CHAPTER XVII
She had been waiting for him at the top of the stairs, had been waiting for him, indeed, half the morning, and now at the sound of his key in the lock of the front door, slipping in between Mercury and Fortune, who kept a constant vigil over tenants, peddlers, or intruders, she rushed again to the banisters.
She was flushed, her small mouth wore a pinched expression, and her whole manner indicated suppressed nervousness.
“Well, Ebner!” she exclaimed with a sigh, and in the voice of a woman who had been waiting in vain for a husband who had stayed out all night.
He raised his lean head as he climbed, the morning’s extra sticking out of his overcoat pocket, his eyes studying his wife curiously.
“Well, Em!” he returned, with a cheerful drawl, having a scot-free conscience apropos of the night and being cold sober.
“Ebner!” she exclaimed tragically, as he followed her into the sitting-room.
The flush over her round, apple-like, stupid little face deepened, her small, pinched mouth drooped painfully at the corners; she seemed about to weep, and under the pressure of emotion the skin trembled and showed white under the first crease of her double chin.
She turned by the centre-table and faced him now with the look of a woman about to announce the sudden death of an old friend.
“Ebner!” she repeated painfully, “haveyou heard the news!”—and with that her small hands covered her eyes.
“Heard? Heard what news? What’s ailin’ you, Em?”
“Ebner!” she exclaimed solemnly, “you don’t mean to tell me you haven’t heard? Why, there it is sticking right out of your pocket, and you mean to tell me you haven’t evenreadit? Oh, Ebner!” she half sobbed, “isn’t it terrible!”
“Oh,that!” he grinned, wrenching out the extra, flinging off his overcoat and coat, and chucking both on the sofa. “’Bout the slickest piece of free advertisement I’ve seen in years.”
The grin broadened.
“Didn’t cost him a cent.”
“Oh, Ebner! How my heart aches for his poor wife!”
“Poor? You don’t call a womanpoorwho’s got a brownstone front all her own—horses, three meals a day, and a butler—do yer? Any one’d think half the world had come to an end and the other half was about to fail in business.”
“To—to think!” she faltered. “Oh, I’d like to believe, Ebner, there wasn’t a word of truth in it—I just would. I’d just like to believe the whole thing was—just—just—like some awful dream. It’s so terrible—aman of his refinement and position, married! Oh! why do you stand there looking at me? Why can’t you say something, Ebner? Can’t you see how terrible it all is—just as he was becoming an old friend—girlie’s happiness and all! What can we expect now? Society will close her gates to him—yes, she will—I’m just as sure of it as my name’s Emma Ford. We’ll have to begin all over again, dear——”
“Close her gates, eh? Not to any alarmin’ extent,” he declared. “I’d give a cool hundred if I was in his shoes. You bet your sweet life I would! Don’t you git to worryin’ about society’s gates, Em. They wa’n’t never so wide open to him as they be now. Ain’t he in the public eye? Ain’t he? Well, I guess yes—right up in the limelight! Ever stop to think whatthatmeans? Why, it’s credit, it’s friends, it’s business. It’d mean sales to me—only I ain’t got it. I’m one er them fellers that Fortune seldom winks at—and if she did I’d feel like payin’ her fifty per cent for her trouble.”
She shook her head disconsolately.
“You needn’t worry a mite about Lamont now,” he continued. “He’s on the right railroad tack. He’s flyin’ along the Grand Trunk line to success, and if I ain’t mistook, he’s passin’ small stations without even ringin’ his bell.”
She was silent as usual under his bombastic speech, knowing it was useless to interrupt him.
“Didn’t feature no portrait of the feller that hit him, did they?” he went on with enthusiasm. “Notmuch. Ain’t that proof enough Lamont’s the favorite? Hadn’t thought of that, had yer? You ain’t seen no picter of the other feller, have yer? No, sir. And you won’t, neither; they ain’t gothimframed up in no flags or croquet mallets and a horseshoe for luck thrown into the bargain. That’s what I call a ten strike!” he cried, slapping open the extra. “Got him all dolled up, natural as life. Any idea what that front page is worth? Be a little surprised, wouldn’t yer, if I was to tell yer five hundred dollars couldn’t buy it. Take the picter alone——”
“Ebner!” she intervened bravely, with bated breath. “You don’t suppose they’d have dared print it if it wasn’t true?”
“Pshaw!” he laughed. “You don’t know ’em. Besides, Em, how do you know the whole thing ain’t a put-up job? One er them little flimflam hoaxes fer notoriety.”
“Ebner!”
“Well, the more I come to think of it the more I dunno but what I’m right. Where’s girlie?”
“She’s out, dear. It would have broken your heart to have seen her when she read it.”
“What’dshesay?”
“You know how she is, dear. She just went out. She said she was going to luncheon with the Jacksons. She looked positively sick—awful shock to her, Ebner. You know how independent and silent she is when anything affects her.”
“Suppose she thinks her good time’s all knocked inthe head, eh!” he returned, striding over to the closet for his alpaca coat. “Well, they ain’t by a long shot. Why, Em, it ain’t nothin’ but a joke—more I think of it more I know I’m right. Remember Sol Edmunds, Em—the time he hit Bill Sanders fer courtin’ his wife? Remember how it was all a put-up job to give Sheriff Brown the haw, haw?” A vestige of a hopeful smile crept to her flushed face. “Well, they got their names in the papers, didn’t they? Whole column, if I remember right, in the SpringvilleLeader.”
“Oh! Ebner, and you really think, dear, it’s—it isn’t true; that——”
He flung himself into a chair with an easy laugh. He gave her to understand that she was not supposed to have his long, worldly experience in life, but whatever truth there was in it he’d find out for her and tell her.
“If there is any truth in it,” he remarked quite gravely, “I’ll go to him as a friend and find out—maybe I can help him. I wa’n’t never known to desert a friend in trouble, Em, and you know it.”
“I know, dear,” she said meekly. “Ebner, I’d go to him. I want you to express to him my sympathy,” she added, subsiding wearily in the corner of the sofa. “Ourdeepestsympathy. I can’t believe it true of him—say what they may.”
“Go to him? Well, now, little woman, that’s just what I intended to do. Thinks I, I’ll go to him, man to man—a friend in need, Em.”
“I know, dear. You’ll do what is best.”
“Don’t I always do what is best?” he smiled, and went over and planted a sound kiss on her flushed cheek.
For a brief moment she held his long hand in hers, pressing it affectionately.
“Yes, dear,” she murmured, “you always do. It’s girlie I’m thinking about. If you only could have seen her, Ebner.”
“Well, now!” he drawled. “I ain’t such a thick-head but what I can imagine it did shake her up considerable. You know how girls be, Em. Slightest thing upsets ’em. Last thing they do is to stop and reason. Take a fact always fer granted without divinin’ the source.”
Ford went to Lamont ostensibly to offer his condolences. His intention was to borrow enough money from him to pay back Miss Ann. That he should have succeeded in borrowing a dollar even from that wayward gentleman seems incredible, and yet one of those strange changes had come over “Handsome Jack.” Having played the fool, things took with him a more serious turn of mind. He thought of Sue, and as is often the case with men of his kind, he fell suddenly head over heels in love with her. Not finding him at his house, Ebner Ford found him some days later at his club.
It proved to be a winning day for Ebner Ford. Luck was with him from the first. He explained to Lamont, “man to man,” all that had happened. He found Lamont exceedingly nervous after his spree, butgenerous, his latter condition of mind, no doubt, due to his heavy winnings and his desire to stand well in favor with Mrs. Ford.
The two men had a heavy luncheon at a near-by chop-house, and at the end of it Lamont would not hear of Sue leaving the apartment. That was out of the question. Over a long cigar he drew breath, and therewith on the spot a check ample enough to make up what Ford owed Miss Ann, and for which he took (not without some polite protest) enough of the United Laundry Association’s gilt-edged preferred as security. He could not believe but that Sue would be overwhelmingly grateful. He intended, also, to hold the loan over Ford, if he ever got ugly over his attentions to his stepdaughter. After all, he reasoned, Sue was not Ford’s daughter. By his generosity he also wished to defeat Enoch of his desire to get the Fords out of the house. Ebner Ford left him at a little after three, every nerve in him tingling over his good luck.
“There ain’t no one can beat me,” he said to himself, as he sauntered out of the greasy door of the chop-house and down Broadway, “when it comes to a crisis. I went to him man to man.” He smiled with satisfaction. “Well, I pulled off the trick, didn’t I? I got what I wanted.” Now and then his lean, long hand felt in his inside pocket to see if Lamont’s magnanimous check was still safe, and having found that it was, he crossed over to a drug-store and bought a fifty-cent box of stale candy for his wife.
“Business acumen,” he muttered, still musing asthe clerk wrapped it up and handed him his package of chocolate creams and his change. The stimulus of sudden and easy money buoyed him up into grand good-humor. “Talked to him like a Dutch uncle, didn’t I? Not one man in a thousand could have done what I done to-day.” And in this he was right.
Farther down the thoroughfare he thought of girlie, of the part she had unconsciously but valuably played in the transaction. For all of half an hour he wandered around a department store looking for a bargain to please Sue, but finding they were all expensive, wandered out again and decided some day to surprise her with a new umbrella. “The best money can buy,” he declared, as he boarded a green horse-car, and lighted a fresh cigar Lamont had given him. He stood on the front platform back of the driver, whose big gloved hand had polished continually the knob of the steel brake handle, and whose whip hung limp over the dashboard. They talked of horses in general, and the weather in particular, the toughness of winter especially, and mentioned a few aldermen besides, and the chances on the next election for “ivery dacent hard-workin’ man,” as the veteran driver expressed it. Meanwhile the car rattled on, all its windows shivered and shook as with the ague, and the smell of its kerosene-lamps was noticeable even on the front platform. Now and then the steaming horses stopped for a second’s hard-earned panting rest, while a passenger got on. Now and then Ford nodded back to the conductor to go ahead, but atMadison Square he swung off with an easy “So long” to the driver, and turned into the Hoffman House with an air of a man who had suddenly been lifted out of his troubles forever.
Success is a dangerous stimulant. Ford feared nothing now. What he saw ahead was a wider market for his stock. It is possible he saw in his optimistic, visionary way, in his abject ignorance of men at large, other Lamonts whom he could cajole to a luncheon they paid for and extract from the victim other checks to help him out of “the little ups and downs,” as he called them, of the business world. To Ford to-day the horizon of his affairs had cleared to its zenith, and from that great distance things seemed to be coming his way in droves in so vast a proportion that on his return to Waverly Place he garrulously confessed to his wife all that had happened—even to his interview with Enoch; of Lamont’s devotion to them, and of the stanch and generous proof of his friendship. He explained it all to her as merely natural; that in the business world such little incidents were of daily occurrence, and that no really legitimate business was free from them—and, poor soul, she believed him. The news that Lamont was their friend overshadowed anything that had happened.
Could she have kept the joyful news to herself? Impossible! Scarcely had Sue entered the door, when her mother told her everything. Let us pass over this painful scene—of Sue’s humiliation and rage, of how the poor child went straight to Enoch, of how shesobbed out her heart to him, and how he comforted her like a father, glad in his heart that her eyes were open at last to the worthlessness of a man like Lamont, whom he had openly denounced, whose acquaintance with her he had feared from the very first.
Only when Sue had left him did the torrent of Enoch’s rage burst forth. All that had previously happened was nothing compared to this—that Ebner Ford should have used Sue, his own stepdaughter, as a means to an end; that he had dared obtain money from Lamont, giving him his worthless stock, giving him as collateralcarte blanche, as it were, to continue his attentions to Sue as he pleased.
“Good God!” he cried aloud. Then he felt weak and sank into his chair.
For the first time Enoch Crane was beginning to feel how helpless he was to protect a child he loved. After all, what had he accomplished? Denounced a scoundrel in his club, denounced him before his intimate friends, threatened him with what? Then the scandal in the newspapers. Even that had turned out well for the man he despised. “Good God!” he kept murmuring to himself. “What next?”
He sat there white, livid, the muscles of his jaw working, sat there beating a tattoo on the arm of his chair with both hands, a savage gleam in his eyes.
Suddenly he leaped out of his chair and rang for Moses, and presently that servant appeared.
“Yas, Marser Crane,” said Moses, poking his gray woolly head in the door.
“Tell Mr. Ford I should like to see him at once,” said Enoch, so sharply that Moses opened the whites of his eyes wide. “Tell him I wish to see him immediately,” declared Enoch again.
“’Spec’ somethin’s gone wrong with you, Marser Crane,” ventured Moses gently.
“Wrong!” Enoch shouted. “Wrong! Nothing’s gone right in this house since Ford entered.”
“Dat’s suttenly de truth, Marser,” agreed Moses. “What’s a been a-goin’ along ain’t suttenly gone right—I seen it frum de fust; ever since he moved in.”
“You will go down at once, Moses, and tell him I wish to see him.”
“I’se on my way,” smiled Moses. “I’ll tell him what you done said to me—’meadiately—dat you won’t take no for an answer. Dat’s it—’meadiately.”
Moses withdrew. In less than five minutes he returned.
“Well?” asked Enoch, as he opened his door.
“De—de—” (he was about to say gentleman, but checked himself) “de—de—man says—dat he’s obleeged to you fer your invitation, but he ain’t a-comin’. Dat’s his very words, Marser Crane.”
Enoch started.
“You’re sure that’s what he said?” he exclaimed, shooting forward in his chair angrily.
“Dem was his very words,” declared Moses. “Hol’ on—he done repeated, as I recollect, he ain’t a-comin’.”
“He said that to you, did he?” said Enoch slowly.
“Dat suttenly was his very syllables,” declared the old darky, scratching his woolly head.
“How did he say it?” snapped Enoch.
“Dere ain’t no use er makin’ any bones ’bout de way dat man talks to me,” Moses declared. “Talks like my ole overseer, ’cept he ain’t got no whip to cut me with. Fust day I laid eyes on him I sez to Matilda, he ain’t no gen’mun—seen it de way he was a hollerin’ an’ flambastin’ round de movers.”
“You may go, Moses,” said Enoch quietly.
“Yas, sir. Thank yer, Marser Crane,” and he was gone.
For a long while Enoch sat there, muttering to himself. Before him on the table lay his check payable to the order of Miss Ann Moulton. In case Ebner Ford failed her he had decided to come to the rescue.