Chapter V
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 heisyour employer, which not many men who knew your record would care to be.”
“Ah, but Emmons doesn’t knowmyrecord.”
“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, takingher 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 hehas 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 therewas 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 decidedto 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 thecourse 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 forwas 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 theafternoon, 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 hehad 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, andfigure at night, he would not in between times play third to her and herfiancé.
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 inthe 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.