It was very hot in the Park, and young Van Bibber, who has a good heart and a great deal more money than good-hearted people generally get, was cross and somnolent. He had told his groom to bring a horse he wanted to try to the Fifty-ninth Street entrance at ten o'clock, and the groom had not appeared. Hence Van Bibber's crossness.
He waited as long as his dignity would allow, and then turned off into a by-lane end dropped on a bench and looked gloomily at the Lohengrin swans with the paddle-wheel attachment that circle around the lake. They struck him as the most idiotic inventions he had ever seen, and he pitied, with the pity of a man who contemplates crossing the ocean to be measured for his fall clothes, the people who could find delight in having some one paddle them around an artificial lake.
Two little girls from the East Side, with a lunch basket, and an older girl with her hair down her back, sat down on a bench beside him and gazed at the swans.
The place was becoming too popular, and Van Bibber decided to move on. But the bench on which he sat was in the shade, and the asphalt walk leading to the street was in the sun, and his cigarette was soothing, so he ignored the near presence of the three little girls, and remained where he was.
“I s'pose,” said one of the two little girls, in a high, public school voice, “there's lots to see from those swan-boats that youse can't see from the banks.”
“Oh, lots,” assented the girl with long hair.
“If you walked all round the lake, clear all the way round, you could see all there is to see,” said the third, “except what there's in the middle where the island is.”
“I guess it's mighty wild on that island,” suggested the youngest.
“Eddie Case he took a trip around the lake on a swan-boat the other day. He said that it was grand. He said youse could see fishes and ducks, and that it looked just as if there were snakes and things on the island.”
“What sort of things?” asked the other one, in a hushed voice.
“Well, wild things,” explained the elder, vaguely; “bears and animals like that, that grow in wild places.”
Van Bibber lit a fresh cigarette, and settled himself comfortably and unreservedly to listen.
“My, but I'd like to take a trip just once,” said the youngest, under her breath. Then she clasped her fingers together and looked up anxiously at the elder girl, who glanced at her with severe reproach.
“Why, Mame!” she said; “ain't you ashamed! Ain't you having a good time 'nuff without wishing for everything you set your eyes on?”
Van Bibber wondered at this—why humans should want to ride around on the swans in the first place, and why, if they had such a wild desire, they should not gratify it.
“Why, it costs more'n it costs to come all the way up town in an open car,” added the elder girl, as if in answer to his unspoken question.
The younger girl sighed at this, and nodded her head in submission, but blinked longingly at the big swans and the parti-colored awning and the red seats.
“I beg your pardon,” said Van Bibber, addressing himself uneasily to the eldest girl with long hair, “but if the little girl would like to go around in one of those things, and—and hasn't brought the change with her, you know, I'm sure I should be very glad if she'd allow me to send her around.”
“Oh! will you?” exclaimed the little girl, with a jump, and so sharply and in such a shrill voice that Van Bibber shuddered. But the elder girl objected.
“I'm afraid maw wouldn't like our taking money from any one we didn't know,” she said with dignity; “but if you're going anyway and want company—”
“Oh! my, no,” said Van Bibber, hurriedly. He tried to picture himself riding around the lake behind a tin swan with three little girls from the East Side, and a lunch basket.
“Then,” said the head of the trio, “we can't go.”
There was such a look of uncomplaining acceptance of this verdict on the part of the two little girls, that Van Bibber felt uncomfortable. He looked to the right and to the left, and then said desperately, “Well, come along.” The young man in a blue flannel shirt, who did the paddling, smiled at Van Bibber's riding-breeches, which were so very loose at one end and so very tight at the other, and at his gloves and crop. But Van Bibber pretended not to care. The three little girls placed the awful lunch basket on the front seat and sat on the middle one, and Van Bibber cowered in the back. They were hushed in silent ecstasy when it started, and gave little gasps of pleasure when it careened slightly in turning. It was shady under the awning, and the motion was pleasant enough, but Van Bibber was so afraid some one would see him that he failed to enjoy it.
But as soon as they passed into the narrow straits and were shut in by the bushes and were out of sight of the people, he relaxed, and began to play the host. He pointed out the fishes among the rocks at the edges of the pool, and the sparrows and robins bathing and ruffling their feathers in the shallow water, and agreed with them about the possibility of bears, and even tigers, in the wild part of the island, although the glimpse of the gray helmet of a Park policeman made such a supposition doubtful.
And it really seemed as though they were enjoying it more than he ever enjoyed a trip up the Sound on a yacht or across the ocean on a record-breaking steamship. It seemed long enough before they got back to Van Bibber, but his guests were evidently but barely satisfied. Still, all the goodness in his nature would not allow him to go through that ordeal again.
He stepped out of the boat eagerly and helped out the girl with long hair as though she had been a princess and tipped the rude young man who had laughed at him, but who was perspiring now with the work he had done; and then as he turned to leave the dock he came face to face with A Girl He Knew and Her brother.
Her brother said, “How're you, Van Bibber? Been taking a trip around the world in eighty minutes?” And added in a low voice, “Introduce me to your young lady friends from Hester Street.”
“Ah, how're you—quite a surprise!” gasped Van Bibber, while his late guests stared admiringly at the pretty young lady in the riding-habit, and utterly refused to move on. “Been taking ride on the lake,” stammered Van Bibber; “most exhilarating. Young friends of mine—these young ladies never rode on lake, so I took 'em. Did you see me?”
“Oh, yes, we saw you,” said Her brother, dryly, while she only smiled at him, but so kindly and with such perfect understanding that Van Bibber grew red with pleasure and bought three long strings of tickets for the swans at some absurd discount, and gave each little girl a string.
“There,” said Her brother to the little ladies from Hester Street, “now you can take trips for a week without stopping. Don't try to smuggle in any laces, and don't forget to fee the smoking-room steward.”
The Girl He Knew said they were walking over to the stables, and that he had better go get his other horse and join her, which was to be his reward for taking care of the young ladies. And the three little girls proceeded to use up the yards of tickets so industriously that they were sunburned when they reached the tenement, and went to bed dreaming of a big white swan, and a beautiful young gentleman in patent-leather riding-boots and baggy breeches.
There had been a dance up town, but as Van Bibber could not find Her there, he accepted young Travers's suggestion to go over to Jersey City and see a “go” between “Dutchy” Mack and a colored person professionally known as the Black Diamond. They covered up all signs of their evening dress with their great-coats, and filled their pockets with cigars, for the smoke which surrounds a “go” is trying to sensitive nostrils, and they also fastened their watches to both key-chains. Alf Alpin, who was acting as master of ceremonies, was greatly pleased and flattered at their coming, and boisterously insisted on their sitting on the platform. The fact was generally circulated among the spectators that the “two gents in high hats” had come in a carriage, and this and their patent-leather boots made them objects of keen interest. It was even whispered that they were the “parties” who were putting up the money to back the Black Diamond against the “Hester Street Jackson.” This in itself entitled them to respect. Van Bibber was asked to hold the watch, but he wisely declined the honor, which was given to Andy Spielman, the sporting reporter of theTrack and Ring, whose watch-case was covered with diamonds, and was just the sort of a watch a timekeeper should hold.
It was two o'clock before “Dutchy” Mack's backer threw the sponge into the air, and three before they reached the city. They had another reporter in the cab with them besides the gentleman who had bravely held the watch in the face of several offers to “do for” him; and as Van Bibber was ravenously hungry, and as he doubted that he could get anything at that hour at the club, they accepted Spielman's invitation and went for a porterhouse steak and onions at the Owl's Nest, Gus McGowan's all-night restaurant on Third Avenue.
It was a very dingy, dirty place, but it was as warm as the engine-room of a steamboat, and the steak was perfectly done and tender. It was too late to go to bed, so they sat around the table, with their chairs tipped back and their knees against its edge. The two club men had thrown off their great-coats, and their wide shirt fronts and silk facings shone grandly in the smoky light of the oil lamps and the red glow from the grill in the corner. They talked about the life the reporters led, and the Philistines asked foolish questions, which the gentleman of the press answered without showing them how foolish they were.
“And I suppose you have all sorts of curious adventures,” said Van Bibber, tentatively.
“Well, no, not what I would call adventures,” said one of the reporters. “I have never seen anything that could not be explained or attributed directly to some known cause, such as crime or poverty or drink. You may think at first that you have stumbled on something strange and romantic, but it comes to nothing. You would suppose that in a great city like this one would come across something that could not be explained away something mysterious or out of the common, like Stevenson's Suicide Club. But I have not found it so. Dickens once told James Payn that the most curious thing he ever saw In his rambles around London was a ragged man who stood crouching under the window of a great house where the owner was giving a ball. While the man hid beneath a window on the ground floor, a woman wonderfully dressed and very beautiful raised the sash from the inside and dropped her bouquet down into the man's hand, and he nodded and stuck it under his coat and ran off with it.
“I call that, now, a really curious thing to see. But I have never come across anything like it, and I have been in every part of this big city, and at every hour of the night and morning, and I am not lacking in imagination either, but no captured maidens have ever beckoned to me from barred windows nor 'white hands waved from a passing hansom.' Balzac and De Musset and Stevenson suggest that they have had such adventures, but they never come to me. It is all commonplace and vulgar, and always ends in a police court or with a 'found drowned' in the North River.”
McGowan, who had fallen into a doze behind the bar, woke suddenly and shivered and rubbed his shirt-sleeves briskly. A woman knocked at the side door and begged for a drink “for the love of heaven,” and the man who tended the grill told her to be off. They could hear her feeling her way against the wall and cursing as she staggered out of the alley. Three men came in with a hack driver and wanted everybody to drink with them, and became insolent when the gentlemen declined, and were in consequence hustled out one at a time by McGowan, who went to sleep again immediately, with his head resting among the cigar boxes and pyramids of glasses at the back of the bar, and snored.
“You see,” said the reporter, “it is all like this. Night in a great city is not picturesque and it is not theatrical. It is sodden, sometimes brutal, exciting enough until you get used to it, but it runs in a groove. It is dramatic, but the plot is old and the motives and characters always the same.”
The rumble of heavy market wagons and the rattle of milk carts told them that it was morning, and as they opened the door the cold fresh air swept into the place and made them wrap their collars around their throats and stamp their feet. The morning wind swept down the cross-street from the East River and the lights of the street lamps and of the saloon looked old and tawdry. Travers and the reporter went off to a Turkish bath, and the gentleman who held the watch, and who had been asleep for the last hour, dropped into a nighthawk and told the man to drive home. It was almost clear now and very cold, and Van Bibber determined to walk. He had the strange feeling one gets when one stays up until the sun rises, of having lost a day somewhere, and the dance he had attended a few hours before seemed to have come off long ago, and the fight in Jersey City was far back in the past.
The houses along the cross-street through which he walked were as dead as so many blank walls, and only here and there a lace curtain waved out of the open window where some honest citizen was sleeping. The street was quite deserted; not even a cat or a policeman moved on it and Van Bibber's footsteps sounded brisk on the sidewalk. There was a great house at the corner of the avenue and the cross-street on which he was walking. The house faced the avenue and a stone wall ran back to the brown stone stable which opened on the side street. There was a door in this wall, and as Van Bibber approached it on his solitary walk it opened cautiously, and a man's head appeared in it for an instant and was withdrawn again like a flash, and the door snapped to. Van Bibber stopped and looked at the door and at the house and up and down the street. The house was tightly closed, as though some one was lying inside dead, and the streets were still empty.
Van Bibber could think of nothing in his appearance so dreadful as to frighten an honest man, so he decided the face he had had a glimpse of must belong to a dishonest one. It was none of his business, he assured himself, but it was curious, and he liked adventure, and he would have liked to prove his friend the reporter, who did not believe in adventure, in the wrong. So he approached the door silently, and jumped and caught at the top of the wall and stuck one foot on the handle of the door, and, with the other on the knocker, drew himself up and looked cautiously down on the other side. He had done this so lightly that the only noise he made was the rattle of the door-knob on which his foot had rested, and the man inside thought that the one outside was trying to open the door, and placed his shoulder to it and pressed against it heavily. Van Bibber, from his perch on the top of the wall, looked down directly on the other's head and shoulders. He could see the top of the man's head only two feet below, and he also saw that in one hand he held a revolver and that two bags filled with projecting articles of different sizes lay at his feet.
It did not need explanatory notes to tell Van Bibber that the man below had robbed the big house on the corner, and that if it had not been for his having passed when he did the burglar would have escaped with his treasure. His first thought was that he was not a policeman, and that a fight with a burglar was not in his line of life; and this was followed by the thought that though the gentleman who owned the property in the two bags was of no interest to him, he was, as a respectable member of society, more entitled to consideration than the man with the revolver.
The fact that he was now, whether he liked it or not, perched on the top of the wall like Humpty Dumpty, and that the burglar might see him and shoot him the next minute, had also an immediate influence on his movements. So he balanced himself cautiously and noiselessly and dropped upon the man's head and shoulders, bringing him down to the flagged walk with him and under him. The revolver went off once in the struggle, but before the burglar could know how or from where his assailant had come, Van Bibber was standing up over him and had driven his heel down on his hand and kicked the pistol out of his fingers. Then he stepped quickly to where it lay and picked it up and said, “Now, if you try to get up I'll shoot at you.” He felt an unwarranted and ill-timedly humorous inclination to add, “and I'll probably miss you,” but subdued it. The burglar, much to Van Bibber's astonishment, did not attempt to rise, but sat up with his hands locked across his knees and said: “Shoot ahead. I'd a damned sight rather you would.”
His teeth were set and his face desperate and bitter, and hopeless to a degree of utter hopelessness that Van Bibber had never imagined.
“Go ahead,” reiterated the man, doggedly, “I won't move. Shoot me.”
It was a most unpleasant situation. Van Bibber felt the pistol loosening in his hand, and he was conscious of a strong inclination to lay it down and ask the burglar to tell him all about it.
“You haven't got much heart,” said Van Bibber, finally. “You're a pretty poor sort of a burglar, I should say.”
“What's the use?” said the man, fiercely. “I won't go back—I won't go back there alive. I've served my time forever in that hole. If I have to go back again—s'help me if I don't do for a keeper and die for it. But I won't serve there no more.”
“Go back where?” asked Van Bibber, gently, and greatly interested; “to prison?”
“To prison, yes!” cried the man, hoarsely: “to a grave. That's where. Look at my face,” he said, “and look at my hair. That ought to tell you where I've been. With all the color gone out of my skin, and all the life out of my legs. You needn't be afraid of me. I couldn't hurt you if I wanted to. I'm a skeleton and a baby, I am. I couldn't kill a cat. And now you're going to send me back again for another lifetime. For twenty years, this time, into that cold, forsaken hole, and after I done my time so well and worked so hard.” Van Bibber shifted the pistol from one hand to the other and eyed his prisoner doubtfully.
“How long have you been out?” he asked, seating himself on the steps of the kitchen and holding the revolver between his knees. The sun was driving the morning mist away, and he had forgotten the cold.
“I got out yesterday,” said the man.
Van Bibber glanced at the bags and lifted the revolver. “You didn't waste much time,” he said.
“No,” answered the man, sullenly, “no, I didn't. I knew this place and I wanted money to get West to my folks, and the Society said I'd have to wait until I earned it, and I couldn't wait. I haven't seen my wife for seven years, nor my daughter. Seven years, young man; think of that—seven years. Do you know how long that is? Seven years without seeing your wife or your child! And they're straight people, they are,” he added, hastily. “My wife moved West after I was put away and took another name, and my girl never knew nothing about me. She thinks I'm away at sea. I was to join 'em. That was the plan. I was to join 'em, and I thought I could lift enough here to get the fare, and now,” he added, dropping his face in his hands, “I've got to go back. And I had meant to live straight after I got West,—God help me, but I did! Not that it makes much difference now. An' I don't care whether you believe it or not neither,” he added, fiercely.
“I didn't say whether I believed it or not,” answered Van Bibber, with grave consideration.
He eyed the man for a brief space without speaking, and the burglar looked back at him, doggedly and defiantly, and with not the faintest suggestion of hope in his eyes, or of appeal for mercy. Perhaps it was because of this fact, or perhaps it was the wife and child that moved Van Bibber, but whatever his motives were, he acted on them promptly. “I suppose, though,” he said, as though speaking to himself, “that I ought to give you up.”
“I'll never go back alive,” said the burglar, quietly.
“Well, that's bad, too,” said Van Bibber. “Of course I don't know whether you're lying or not, and as to your meaning to live honestly, I very much doubt it; but I'll give you a ticket to wherever your wife is, and I'll see you on the train. And you can get off at the next station and rob my house to-morrow night, if you feel that way about it. Throw those bags inside that door where the servant will see them before the milkman does, and walk on out ahead of me, and keep your hands in your pockets, and don't try to run. I have your pistol, you know.”
The man placed the bags inside the kitchen door; and, with a doubtful look at his custodian, stepped out into the street, and walked, as he was directed to do, toward the Grand Central station. Van Bibber kept just behind him, and kept turning the question over in his mind as to what he ought to do. He felt very guilty as he passed each policeman, but he recovered himself when he thought of the wife and child who lived in the West, and who were “straight.”
“Where to?” asked Van Bibber, as he stood at the ticket-office window. “Helena, Montana,” answered the man with, for the first time, a look of relief. Van Bibber bought the ticket and handed it to the burglar. “I suppose you know,” he said, “that you can sell that at a place down town for half the money.” “Yes, I know that,” said the burglar. There was a half-hour before the train left, and Van Bibber took his charge into the restaurant and watched him eat everything placed before him, with his eyes glancing all the while to the right or left. Then Van Bibber gave him some money and told him to write to him, and shook hands with him. The man nodded eagerly and pulled off his hat as the car drew out of the station; and Van Bibber came down town again with the shop girls and clerks going to work, still wondering if he had done the right thing.
He went to his rooms and changed his clothes, took a cold bath, and crossed over to Delmonico's for his breakfast, and, while the waiter laid the cloth in the cafe, glanced at the headings in one of the papers. He scanned first with polite interest the account of the dance on the night previous and noticed his name among those present. With greater interest he read of the fight between “Dutchy” Mack and the “Black Diamond,” and then he read carefully how “Abe” Hubbard, alias “Jimmie the Gent,” a burglar, had broken jail in New Jersey, and had been traced to New York. There was a description of the man, and Van Bibber breathed quickly as he read it. “The detectives have a clew of his whereabouts,” the account said; “if he is still in the city they are confident of recapturing him. But they fear that the same friends who helped him to break jail will probably assist him from the country or to get out West.”
“They may do that,” murmured Van Bibber to himself, with a smile of grim contentment; “they probably will.”
Then he said to the waiter, “Oh, I don't know. Some bacon and eggs and green things and coffee.”
Young Van Bibber came up to town in June from Newport to see his lawyer about the preparation of some papers that needed his signature. He found the city very hot and close, and as dreary and as empty as a house that has been shut up for some time while its usual occupants are away in the country.
As he had to wait over for an afternoon train, and as he was down town, he decided to lunch at a French restaurant near Washington Square, where some one had told him you could get particular things particularly well cooked. The tables were set on a terrace with plants and flowers about them, and covered with a tricolored awning. There were no jangling horse-car bells nor dust to disturb him, and almost all the other tables were unoccupied. The waiters leaned against these tables and chatted in a French argot; and a cool breeze blew through the plants and billowed the awning, so that, on the whole, Van Bibber was glad he had come.
There was, beside himself, an old Frenchman scolding over his late breakfast; two young artists with Van Dyke beards, who ordered the most remarkable things in the same French argot that the waiters spoke; and a young lady and a young gentleman at the table next to his own. The young man's back was toward him, and he could only see the girl when the youth moved to one side. She was very young and very pretty, and she seemed in a most excited state of mind from the tip of her wide-brimmed, pointed French hat to the points of her patent-leather ties. She was strikingly well-bred in appearance, and Van Bibber wondered why she should be dining alone with so young a man.
“It wasn't my fault,” he heard the youth say earnestly. “How could I know he would be out of town? and anyway it really doesn't matter. Your cousin is not the only clergyman in the city.”
“Of course not,” said the girl, almost tearfully, “but they're not my cousins and he is, and that would have made it so much, oh, so very much different. I'm awfully frightened!”
“Runaway couple,” commented Van Bibber. “Most interesting. Read about 'em often; never seen 'em. Most interesting.”
He bent his head over an entree, but he could not help hearing what followed, for the young runaways were indifferent to all around them, and though he rattled his knife and fork in a most vulgar manner, they did not heed him nor lower their voices.
“Well, what are you going to do?” said the girl, severely but not unkindly. “It doesn't seem to me that you are exactly rising to the occasion.”
“Well, I don't know,” answered the youth, easily. “We're safe here anyway. Nobody we know ever comes here, and if they did they are out of town now. You go on and eat something, and I'll get a directory and look up a lot of clergymen's addresses, and then we can make out a list and drive around in a cab until we find one who has not gone off on his vacation. We ought to be able to catch the Fall River boat back at five this afternoon; then we can go right on to Boston from Fall River to-morrow morning and run down to Narragansett during the day.”
“They'll never forgive us,” said the girl.
“Oh, well, that's all right,” exclaimed the young man, cheerfully. “Really, you're the most uncomfortable young person I ever ran away with. One might think you were going to a funeral. You were willing enough two days ago, and now you don't help me at all. Are you sorry?” he asked, and then added, “but please don't say so, even if you are.”
“No, not sorry, exactly,” said the girl; “but, indeed, Ted, it is going to make so much talk. If we only had a girl with us, or if you had a best man, or if we had witnesses, as they do in England, and a parish registry, or something of that sort; or if Cousin Harold had only been at home to do the marrying.”
The young gentleman called Ted did not look, judging from the expression of his shoulders, as if he were having a very good time.
He picked at the food on his plate gloomily, and the girl took out her handkerchief and then put it resolutely back again and smiled at him. The youth called the waiter and told him to bring a directory, and as he turned to give the order Van Bibber recognized him and he recognized Van Bibber. Van Bibber knew him for a very nice boy, of a very good Boston family named Standish, and the younger of two sons. It was the elder who was Van Bibber's particular friend. The girl saw nothing of this mutual recognition, for she was looking with startled eyes at a hansom that had dashed up the side street and was turning the corner.
“Ted, O Ted!” she gasped. “It's your brother. There! In that hansom. I saw him perfectly plainly. Oh, how did he find us? What shall we do?”
Ted grew very red and then very white.
“Standish,” said Van Bibber, jumping up and reaching for his hat, “pay this chap for these things, will you, and I'll get rid of your brother.”
Van Bibber descended the steps lighting a cigar as the elder Standish came up them on a jump.
“Hello, Standish!” shouted the New Yorker. “Wait a minute; where are you going? Why, it seems to rain Standishes to-day! First see your brother; then I see you. What's on?”
“You've seen him?” cried the Boston man, eagerly. “Yes, and where is he? Was she with him? Are they married? Am I in time?”
Van Bibber answered these different questions to the effect that he had seen young Standish and Mrs. Standish not a half an hour before, and that they were just then taking a cab for Jersey City, whence they were to depart for Chicago.
“The driver who brought them here, and who told me where they were, said they could not have left this place by the time I would reach it,” said the elder brother, doubtfully.
“That's so,” said the driver of the cab, who had listened curiously. “I brought 'em here not more'n half an hour ago. Just had time to get back to the depot. They can't have gone long.”
“Yes, but they have,” said Van Bibber. “However, if you get over to Jersey City in time for the 2.30, you can reach Chicago almost as soon as they do. They are going to the Palmer House, they said.”
“Thank you, old fellow,” shouted Standish, jumping back into his hansom. “It's a terrible business. Pair of young fools. Nobody objected to the marriage, only too young, you know. Ever so much obliged.”
“Don't mention it,” said Van Bibber, politely.
“Now, then,” said that young man, as he approached the frightened couple trembling on the terrace, “I've sent your brother off to Chicago. I do not know why I selected Chicago as a place where one would go on a honeymoon. But I'm not used to lying and I'm not very good at it. Now, if you will introduce me, I'll see what can be done toward getting you two babes out of the woods.”
Standish said, “Miss Cambridge, this is Mr. Cortlandt Van Bibber, of whom you have heard my brother speak,” and Miss Cambridge said she was very glad to meet Mr. Van Bibber even under such peculiarly trying circumstances.
“Now what you two want to do,” said Van Bibber, addressing them as though they were just about fifteen years old and he were at least forty, “is to give this thing all the publicity you can.”
“What?” chorused the two runaways, in violent protest.
“Certainly,” said Van Bibber. “You were about to make a fatal mistake. You were about to go to some unknown clergyman of an unknown parish, who would have married you in a back room, without a certificate or a witness, just like any eloping farmer's daughter and lightning-rod agent. Now it's different with you two. Why you were not married respectably in church I don't know, and I do not intend to ask, but a kind Providence has sent me to you to see that there is no talk nor scandal, which is such bad form, and which would have got your names into all the papers. I am going to arrange this wedding properly, and you will kindly remain here until I send a carriage for you. Now just rely on me entirely and eat your luncheon in peace. It's all going to come out right—and allow me to recommend the salad, which is especially good.”
Van Bibber first drove madly to the Little Church Around the Corner, where he told the kind old rector all about it, and arranged to have the church open and the assistant organist in her place, and a district-messenger boy to blow the bellows, punctually at three o'clock. “And now,” he soliloquized, “I must get some names. It doesn't matter much whether they happen to know the high contracting parties or not, but they must be names that everybody knows. Whoever is in town will be lunching at Delmonico's, and the men will be at the clubs.” So he first went to the big restaurant, where, as good luck would have it, he found Mrs. “Regy” Van Arnt and Mrs. “Jack” Peabody, and the Misses Brookline, who had run up the Sound for the day on the yachtMinervaof the Boston Yacht Club, and he told them how things were and swore them to secrecy, and told them to bring what men they could pick up.
At the club he pressed four men into service who knew everybody and whom everybody knew, and when they protested that they had not been properly invited and that they only knew the bride and groom by sight, he told them that made no difference, as it was only their names he wanted. Then he sent a messenger boy to get the biggest suit of rooms on the Fall River boat and another one for flowers, and then he put Mrs. “Regy” Van Arnt into a cab and sent her after the bride, and, as best man, he got into another cab and carried off the groom.
“I have acted either as best man or usher forty-two times now,” said Van Bibber, as they drove to the church, “and this is the first time I ever appeared in either capacity in russia-leather shoes and a blue serge yachting suit. But then,” he added, contentedly, “you ought to see the other fellows. One of them is in a striped flannel.”
Mrs. “Regy” and Miss Cambridge wept a great deal on the way up town, but the bride was smiling and happy when she walked up the aisle to meet her prospective husband, who looked exceedingly conscious before the eyes of the men, all of whom he knew by sight or by name, and not one of whom he had ever met before. But they all shook hands after it was over, and the assistant organist played the Wedding March, and one of the club men insisted in pulling a cheerful and jerky peal on the church bell in the absence of the janitor, and then Van Bibber hurled an old shoe and a handful of rice—which he had thoughtfully collected from the chef at the club—after them as they drove off to the boat.
“Now,” said Van Bibber, with a proud sigh of relief and satisfaction, “I will send that to the papers, and when it is printed to-morrow it will read like one of the most orthodox and one of the smartest weddings of the season. And yet I can't help thinking—”
“Well?” said Mrs. “Regy,” as he paused doubtfully.
“Well, I can't help thinking,” continued Van Bibber, “of Standish's older brother racing around Chicago with the thermometer at 102 in the shade. I wish I had only sent him to Jersey City. It just shows,” he added, mournfully, “that when a man is not practised in lying, he should leave it alone.”