THE HELPERS
BY FRANCIS LYNDE
[Illustration: Tout bien ou rien
The Riverside Press]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY FRANCIS LYNDE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_TO THE MEN AND WOMEN OF THE GUILD COMPASSIONATE, GREETING:_
_Forasmuch as it hath seemed good in the eyes of many to write of those
things which make for the disheartening of all humankind, these things
are written in the hope that the God-gift of loving-kindness, shared
alike by saint and sinner, may in some poor measure be given its due._
_The Author._
THE HELPERS
CHAPTER I
THE curtain had gone down on the first act of the opera, and Jeffard
found his hat and rose to go out. His place was the fourth from the
aisle, and after an ineffectual attempt to make a passageway for him
without rising, the two young women and the elderly man stood up and
folded their opera chairs. Being driven to think pointedly of something
else, Jeffard neglected to acknowledge the courtesy; and the two young
women balanced the account by discussing him after he had passed out of
hearing.
"I think he might at least have said 'Thank you,'" protested the one
in the black-plumed picture-hat, preening herself after the manner
of ruffled birds and disturbed womankind. "I'm in love with your
mountains, and your climate, and your end-of-the-century impetus, but I
can't say that I particularly admire Denver manners."
The clear-eyed young woman in the modest toque laughed joyously.
"Go on, Myra dear; don't mind me. It's so refreshing to hear an
out-of-church opinion on one's self. I know our manners are perfectly
primitive, but what can you expect when every train from the East
brings us a new lot of people to civilize? When you are tempted to
groan over our shortcomings it'll comfort you wonderfully if you will
just stop long enough to remember that a good many of us are the newest
of new tenderfoots!"
"Tenderfoots! What an expression!"
"It's good English, though we did use to say 'tenderfeet' before the
'Century Dictionary' set us right. And it calls the turn, as poppa
would say."
She of the far-reaching plumes bent her eyebrows in severe deprecation.
"Connie, your slang is simply vicious. Will you be good enough to tell
me what 'calls the turn' means?"
"Ask poppa."
Appealed to by the censorious one, the elderly man stopped twiddling
the bit of gold quartz on his watch-guard long enough to explain. He
did it with a little hesitancy, picking his way among the words as one
might handle broken glass, or the edged tools of an unfamiliar trade.
He was a plain man, and he stood in considerable awe of the picture-hat
and its wearer. When he had finished, the toque made honorable amends.
"I beg your pardon, Myra. Really, I didn't know it had anything to
do with gambling. But to go back to our manners: I'll give you the
ponies and the phaeton if I don't convince you that the absent-minded
gentleman on our left here is the tenderest of tenderfoots--most
probably from Philadelphia, too," she added, in mischievous
afterthought.
"You wouldn't dare!"
"You think not? Just wait and you'll see. Oh, cousin mine, you've a lot
to learn about your kind, yet. If you stay out here six months or a
year, you will begin to think your philosophy hasn't been half dreamful
enough."
"How absurd you are, Constance. If I didn't know you to be"--
"Wait a minute; let me start you off right: good, and sensible, and
modest, and unassuming, and dutiful, and brimful of fads"--she checked
the attributes off on her fingers. "You see I have them all by heart."
The little cloud of dust puffing from beneath the drop-curtain began to
subside, and the thumping and rumbling on the stage died away what time
the musicians were clambering back to their places in the orchestra.
Miss Van Vetter swept the aisles and the standing-room with her
opera-glass.
"You will not have a chance to prove it, Connie. He isn't coming back."
"Don't you believe it. I am quite sure he is a gentleman who always
gets the worth of his money."
"What makes you say that?"
"Oh, I don't know; intuition, I suppose. That's what they call it in a
woman, though I think it would be called good judgment in a man."
Taking him at his worst, Miss Elliott's terse characterization of
Henry Jeffard was not altogether inaccurate, though, in the present
instance, he would not have gone back to the theatre if he had known
what else to do with himself. Indeed, he was minded not to go back, but
a turn in the open air made him think better of it, and he strolled in
as the curtain was rising. Whereupon the elderly man and the two young
women had to stand again while he edged past them to his chair.
This time he remembered, and said something about being sorry to
trouble them. Miss Elliott's chair was next to his, and she smiled and
nodded reassuringly. Jeffard was moody and disheartened, and the nod
and the smile went near to the better part of him. He kept his seat
during the next intermission, and ventured a civil commonplace about
the opera. The young woman replied in kind, and the wheel thus set in
motion soon rolled away from the beaten track of trivialities into a
path leading straight to the fulfillment of Miss Elliott's promise to
her cousin.
"Then you haven't been long in Denver," she hazarded on the strength of
a remark which betrayed his unfamiliarity with Colorado.
"Only a few weeks."
"And you like it? Every one does, you know."
Jeffard tried to look decorously acquiescent and made a failure of it.
"I suppose I ought to be polite and say yes; but for once in a way, I'm
going to be sincere and say no."
"You surprise me! I thought everybody, and especially new-comers, liked
Denver; enthusiastically at first, and rather more than less afterward."
"Perhaps I am the exception," he suggested, willing to concede
something. "I fancy it depends very much upon the point of view. To be
brutally frank about it, I came here--like some few hundreds of others,
I presume--to make my fortune; and I think I would better have stayed
at home. I seem to have arrived a decade or two after the fact."
The young woman never swerved from her intention by a hair's-breadth.
"Yes?" she queried. "It's too true that these are not the palmy days of
the 'Matchless' and the 'Little Pittsburg,' notwithstanding Creede and
Cripple Creek. And yet it would seem that even now our Colorado is a
fairer field for ambition and energy than"--
She paused, and Jeffard, with an unanalyzed impression that it was
both very singular and very pleasant to be talking thus freely with a
self-contained young woman whose serenity was apparently undisturbed
by any notions of conventionality, said, "Than a city of the fifth
class in New England, let us say. Yes, I concede that, if you include
ambition; but when it comes to a plain question of earning a living"--
"Oh, as to that," she rejoined, quite willing to argue with him now
that her point was gained, "if it is merely a question of getting
enough to eat and drink I suppose that can be answered anywhere. Even
the Utes managed to answer it here before the Government began feeding
them."
He regarded her curiously, trying to determine her social point of
view by the many little outward signs of prosperity which tasteful
simplicity, unhampered by a lean purse, may exhibit.
"I wonder if you know anything at all about it," he said, half musingly.
"About getting something to eat?" Her laugh was a ripple of pure joy
that had the tonic of the altitudes in it. "I dare say I don't--not in
any practical way; though I do go about among our poor people. That is
what makes me uncharitable. I can't help knowing why so many people
have to go hungry."
Jeffard winced as if the uncharity had a personal application.
"We were speaking of fortunes," he corrected, calmly ignoring the fact
that his own remark had brought up the question of the struggle for
existence. "I think my own case is a fair example of what comes of
chasing ambitious phantoms. I gave up a modest certainty at home to
come here, and"--The musicians were taking their places again, and he
stopped abruptly.
"And now?" The words uttered themselves, and she was sorry for them
when they were beyond recall.
His gesture was expressive of disgust, but there was no resentment in
his reply.
"That was some time ago, as I have intimated; and I am still here and
beginning to wish very heartily that I had never come. I presume you
can infer the rest."
The leader lifted his baton, and the curtain rose on the third act
of the opera. At the same moment the curtain of unacquaintance,
drawn aside a hand's-breadth by the young woman's curiosity, fell
between these two who knew not so much as each other's names, and who
assumed--if either of them thought anything about it--that the wave of
chance which had tossed them together would presently sweep them apart
again.
After the opera the ebbing tide of humanity did so separate them; but
when the man had melted into the crowd in the foyer, the young woman
had a curious little thrill of regret; a twinge of remorse born of
the recollection that she had made him open the book of his life to a
stranger for the satisfying of a mere whim of curiosity.
Miss Van Vetter was ominously silent on the way home, but she made it
a point of conscience to go to Constance's room before her cousin had
gone to bed.
"Connie Elliott," she began, "you deserve to be shaken! How did you
dare to talk with that young man without knowing the first syllable
about him?"
Constance sat down on the edge of the bed and laughed till the tears
came.
"Oh, Myra dear," she gasped, "it's worth any amount of disgrace to see
you ruffle your feathers so beautifully. Don't you see that I talked to
him just because I didn't know any of the syllables? And he told me a
lot of them."
"I should think he did. I suppose he will call on you next."
Connie the unconventional became Miss Elliott in the smallest
appreciable lapse of time. "Indeed, he will not. He knows better than
to do that, even if he is a ten--"
But Miss Van Vetter was gone.