"She wouldn't, of course, have anything more to do with me. She threw me over, as she had every good reason to. I cleared out and went West. She married the cousin and eighteen years ago—so I heard long after her marriage—she died as my mother had died—in childbirth."
Stainton slowly refilled his glass.
Holt shook from him the gloom of the earlier portion of Stainton's narrative. He became once more interested in the manner in which he was accustomed to be interested.
"You certainly cured yourself out West," he said.
"Of my twin horrors?" enquired Stainton. "I tried to. That is why people thought me brave, when they didn't think me rash. I took myself by the shoulders. I said to myself: 'There are two things that you must do. First, you must get over showing your fear of death. Next, you must live in such a way as to postpone old age to the farthest possible limit. In order to accomplish this postponement, in order to approach old age gently and in sound condition, you must make enough money to guarantee you a quiet, unworried life from the age of forty-five or fifty.'"
"Well," said Holt, "you've done it."
"You know what psychologists tell you about apparitions?" said Stainton.
"Not me. I don't go in for spooks."
"They say, George, that if you think you see a ghost and at once run away from it, you will be seeing ghosts forever after; but that if, at the first glimpse of your first ghost, you will only grip your nerves, walk up to him and touch him, you will find that he is only your yesterday's suit flung on a chair and forgotten, or a sheet flapping from a clothesline, or somethingelse commonplace seen only in a different light, and that thereafter you will never again see a ghost."
"Oh!" said Holt, "do they?"
"That principle," said Stainton, "I tried in regard to my fear of death. I couldn't do it with old age, but I could do it with death, and I did. I began by taking small risks. Then I took greater ones, and at last I would deliberately court destruction—or appear to. The outcome was that, by the time you came to know me, I could do the sort of things you admired me for."
"Without turning a hair," Holt added. "You'd got your nerve back. You'd become a brave man."
"No," defined Stainton, "I had become only a man that could conceal his cowardice. I am still, in my heart, as much afraid of death as I ever was."
"I don't believe you," said Holt, more warmly; "and I'll bet you did even better with the other scarecrow."
"Old age?" Stainton's clear eyes snapped. "I had to go at that in another way, but there at least I have succeeded. George, I have trained like a Spartan. I have lived like a monk——"
"Don't I know it, Jim? Remember that night I tried to lure you into the dance-hall at Durango?"
"I have kept hard and keen and clean," said Stainton. "I have got myself—you can guess by what denials and sacrifice and fights—into the shape where the fear of senility, of loss or depreciation of my powers, is reduced to the irreducible minimum." Hespoke a little boastfully, but so earnestly that there was, in tone or words, no hint of the prig. "Tap that," he said.
He expanded his wide chest. He offered his biceps to Holt's congratulatory fingers. He filled his glass to the brim and balanced it, at arm's length, on the palm of his hand without spilling a drop of the wine.
"I went this morning," he said joyously, "to the best doctor in this New York of yours. That fellow went over me with all the latest disease-detecting and age-detecting machinery known to science."
"Well?" asked Holt.
"He said that I was to all intents and purposes not a day over twenty-five."
Holt nodded approval.
"And you've kept your heart and mind as young as you've kept your body; that's a cinch," said he.
"Younger," declared Stainton. "I have had to fight there harder than anywhere else, but I have won. In spite of that first love disappointment, in spite of friends that have gone back on me now and then, in spite of rough work in rough places and among rough men, in spite of money lost and money won, I have kept on believing. I was saying to someone else this evening that there was comfort in the philosophy of the sour-grapes, but I didn't really mean it. At any rate, I never followed the sour-grape school. I have just believed. That is the whole secret of it, George;all that you have to do is to say to yourself; 'I don't care; I won't doubt. Ibelievein the world; I believe in Man.'"
Holt smiled.
"Wait till you know New York," said he.
"I am doubt-proof," answered Stainton. "I am immune."
"And so——" urged Holt, dropping this phase of the subject and reverting to Preston Newberry's niece.
"And so," Stainton took him up, "I decided to marry, sell my mine as soon as a good offer comes and be easy. I came to New York. I went to-night to the opera." His voice grew unaffectedly softer. "And at the opera," he said, "I saw the girl that I had loved all those years ago; that dead girl come to life again; not a curve altered, not a tint faded; not a day older. I knew, in a flash, that it must be my old sweetheart's daughter. And it was."
"What? Muriel Stannard?"
"Whose mother was Muriel Benson. Precisely."
Holt whistled softly.
"Well?" asked he.
"Well," said Stainton, "I intend to marry her."
For a moment Holt made no comment. Then he coughed and finally, as his dry cough produced no visible effect, he broke forth:
"But, Jim——"
There he stopped.
Stainton looked at him enquiringly.
"Yes?"
"But, Jim, you—you——Oh, what's the use!"
"Of course it sounds unusual, to you," admitted Stainton, "but to me it is all simple enough."
Holt took a deep pull at his glass.
"Oh, it's simple, all right," said he. "It's so simple it's artless."
Stainton's iron-grey brows drew together. "I don't understand."
"Of course it sounds unusual to you," admitted Holt. "If you did understand, you wouldn't do this thing. You don't understand; you can't, and that's just the pity of the whole business." Like all men of his stripe, he gathered both conviction and courage from the sound of his own voice. "You've lived in the desert and such places like a what-do-y'-call-it—anchorite—and had opium-dreams without the fun of a smoke."
Stainton stiffened.
"I didn't ask your advice," said he.
"You wanted it," Holt ventured.
"I don't mind your giving it if it amuses you," said Stainton, shrugging his shoulders; "but I am quite clear on one point: you are what most city-bred men are: you have looked so hard after happiness that, when you see it, you can't enjoy it."
"Am I?" The liquor was burning in Holt's eyes."Perhaps I am, but that rule works two ways. Some fellows don't look hard enough. I don't know, but I imagine if a man never uses his eyes he goes blind."
Stainton, who had carried a few of his books to the West with him, wanted to quote Cicero: "Sis a veneris amoribus aversus; quibus si te dedideris, non aliud quidquam possis cogitare quam illud quod diligis." All that he said, however, was:
"I have tried to live in such a way that I may be fit to look a good woman in the face."
"What man alive is fit to do that?" Holt answered.
Stainton did not directly reply, and Holt, somewhat put out by the merely silent opposition, found himself a little at a loss.
"You don't want to tie up with a kid," he nevertheless endeavoured to proceed. "That's what it really amounts to. What you want is a woman, a ripe one. If you're going to live in the swim, you need somebody that can teach you the stroke. You want somebody with theentrée, somebody that can run your house in the Avenue or the Drive and isn't afraid of a man in livery."
"Put my servants in livery?" Stainton was indulgent, but he added: "To make clowns of your fellow men—really I think that's a sin against God."
"All right," said Holt; "but you're in love with an idea. Not even a girl, mind you: an idea. Well, you mark my words: it's a cinch that two people who haven'tanything to do but tell each other how much they love each other are bound, soon enough, to exhaust the subject and begin to want something else to talk about."
"Now it is you who don't understand." Stainton did not know why he should argue with this city waster, unless it was because he had for so long had no chance to speak of these things to anyone. But he went on: "There ought to be love in every marriage, but marriage wasn't ordained for love only."
"Lucky for it," said Holt, "for if it were it would be a worse swindle than it is now, and that's going some. Whatwasit ordained for? Babies?"
"Yes."
"What? There are fifty of 'em born outside of marriage right here in New York every day in the year. When Romeo makes eyes at Juliet, he isn't thinking babies."
"He only doesn't know that he is, that's all."
"Suppose you're right," said Holt; "that's all the more reason why a fellow should want to beget a baby instead of marrying one. Look here, Jim: I'm not butting in on your affairs because I like to; but I know what I'm talking about when I say you can't play this lead without spoiling the game."
"Do you mean," asked Stainton, "that Miss Stannard's guardians will object?"
"Hardly. Her guardians are the Newberrys."
"Then what do you mean?"
Holt interpreted.
"I mean," he said, "that you won't be happy with a child for a wife, and that a child won't be happy with you for a husband."
Stainton started to rise from the table. Then he seemed to think better, seemed to recall his old and brief, but firm, friendship with the Holt of Holt's western days, and sat back in his chair.
"Jim," continued Holt, "you're actually in earnest about all this marrying-talk, aren't you?"
"So much so," replied Stainton, frowning, "that I don't care to have you refer to it in that way."
"Oh, all right. I beg pardon. I didn't intend to make you sore. Only it won't do, you know. Really."
"Why not?"
"I've just been telling you why not. Difference in ages. Too great."
Stainton's face became graver. He leaned forward toward Holt, pushed his glass aside and, with his heavy forefinger, tapped for emphasis upon the board.
"I told you," he said, "that your best New York doctor has pronounced me to all intents and purposes only twenty-five years old."
"O, Hell!" said Holt.
Stainton's brows drew close together.
"I mean what I say," he declared.
"Of course you do. But did the doctor-fellow mean whathesaid?"
"Why shouldn't he? I paid him to tell the truth. He probably thought I suspected some illness, so that, from his point of view, there would have seemed more money in it for him if he had said I needed treatment—his treatment."
"Perhaps. But medicine isn't an exact science yet—not by several thousand graveyards full."
"What of that? I didn't need the doctor's assurances—really. I have my own feelings to go by."
"Yes, I know. I've heard all that before. Many a time. A woman's as old as she looks, but a man's as young as he feels—perhaps."
"A man is as old as his arteries—and a few other units of his physical economy."
"And a girl," said Holt, significantly, "is no older than the—what is it?—units ofherphysical economy."
Stainton bit his under lip.
"A girl is mature at eighteen—mature enough. I won't talk of that, George. We are discussing my age, and I tell you that I have something better than even the specialist's word to stand on: I have the knowledge of my own careful, healthy, abstemious life. I am sounder in body than hundreds and hundreds of what you would call average New Yorkers of twenty-one. I am sounder than their average. More than that, I have done something that most of them have not done: I have kept fresh and unimpaired the tastes, the appetites, the spirit of that age."
"You mean you believe you have."
"I know it."
"How can you know it until you try? And you won't try till you've committed yourself, Jim."
Stainton shook his great head.
"At this moment," he said, "I'm in twice better health—mental, moral, physical and every other way—understand me:every other way—than you were ten years ago."
"Certainly," Holt cheerfully admitted, "I'm past salvation; everybody knows that; but you——"
"I have never been a waster."
"That's just it. It'd be better for you if you had."
"You don't mean that."
"In this mix-up, yes I do. Not much, you know. Just a little picnic now and then."
"Modern medicine has knocked that theory into a cocked hat."
"Has it, Jim? All right. But a man that's been a long time in a close room can stand the close room a bit longer than a fellow that's just come in from the open air. You've formed habits. Fine habits, I grant you that, but you've formed 'em; they're fixed, just as fixed as my bad ones are. You've come to depend on 'em, even if you don't know it. Your brain is used to 'em. So's your body—only more so. Well, what's going to happen when you change 'em all of a sudden—habits of a lifetime, mind you? That's what I want to know: what's going to happen?"
"You talk," said Stainton, "as if every man that married, married under the age of forty-five."
"I talk," Holt retorted, "as if no man of fifty married for his own good a girl of eighteen."
Stainton's fist clenched. His face flushed crimson. His steel-grey eyes narrowed. He raised a tight hand. Then, with the fist in mid-air, his mood changed. He mastered himself. The fist opened. The hand descended gently. Stainton chuckled.
"You don't know what you're talking about," he said. "I forgive you because I know you are speaking only out of your friendship for me." He hesitated. "That is, unless——" He frowned again, but only slightly—"unless you yourself," he interrogatively concluded, "happen to feel toward Miss Stannard as I do?"
Holt relieved him there. It was his turn to laugh, and he laughed heartily.
"O, Lord, no!" said he. "Make yourself easy about that, old man. I've got just enough to live on comfortably by myself without exercising too much economy, and if I ever marry it will have to be a woman that can give me the luxuries I can't get otherwise."
"Then," smiled Stainton, "I hope you will soon need many luxuries and will soon find a good woman to supplythem. I thank you for your interest, George," he went on; "but you have been arguing about me, and, in spite of our ages, you are old and I am young. I am young, I tell you, and even if I were not, I could see nothing wrong in a marriage between a man of my years and a girl of Miss Stannard's."
"Between fifty and eighteen?"
"Between fifty and eighteen. Exactly. It happens every day."
"It does. But do you think because it's plenty, it's right? Do you think that whatever happens often, happens for the best?"
"I do not think; I know. I know that a girl of eighteen is better off with a man steady enough to protect and guide her than she is with an irresponsible boy of her own years."
"How about the irresponsible girl? Why should the boy be more irresponsible than the girl?"
"The girl will have a mature man to protect and guide her."
"A man of twenty-five? Or a man of fifty? Protect and guide!" echoed Holt. "Isthatmarriage?"
"An important part of it."
"Pff!" George sniffed. "You must think that guiding and protecting is an easy business."
"I think," said Stainton, good-humouredly, "that you are a good deal of a fool."
"So you've got it all arranged in your own mind?" Holt, who had ordered his sixth whiskey-and-soda, poured it down his throat. The fifth was already thickening his speech.
"All," said Stainton.
"I see. You've counted on everything but God. Don't you think you'd better reckon a little on God, Jim?"
Stainton bore with him. After all, Holt had now reached that stage of drunkenness at which most drinkers invite the Deity to a part in their libations.
"What I do," Stainton said, "I do without blaming God for my success or failure. I am not one of those persons who, when anything unusually unpleasant comes to them, refer to it as 'God's will.'"
Holt hiccoughed. Religion had never bothered him and so he, in his sober moments, religiously refrained from bothering religion. His cups, however, were sometimes theological.
"Still, He's there, you know," said Holt.
"Your God?" asked Stainton. "Why, your god is only your own prejudices made infinite."
"You know what I mean," Holt laboriously explained. "In the really 'portant things of life, what's fellow do, and what makes him do it?"
"Reason," suggested Stainton.
"The really 'portant things generally come too quick for—for—lemme see: for reason."
"Philosophy?"
"To quick for that, too."
"Instinct, perhaps."
"'Nd don't say 'nstinct. Fellow's 'nstincts are low, but he does something—high. Sort of surroundings 's been brought up in—partly. Not altogether. Partly's something else; something from—from——" Holt groped for the word. "From outside," he concluded triumphantly and waved an explanatory hand. "Well," he added, "that's God."
Stainton rose.
"Yes, yes," he replied. "I dare say. But it's getting late, and I'm an early riser." He beckoned to a waiter for his bill.
"What's hurry?" enquired Holt.
"It is late," repeated Stainton.
Holt shook his head.
"Never late in New York," said he, and then rising uncertainly to his feet, he pointed a warning finger. "Or you may call it Nature. Perhaps's Nature's a better word. Nature. Beautiful nature. Trees and things. Birds mating in—in May. Mustn't go 'gainst beautiful nature, Jim."
"Come on," said Stainton.
But in the street, Holt flung his arms about his unwilling companion's neck.
"I'm—I'm fond of you, Jim," he said. "You save' my life 'n'—an' God knows I love you." Easy tearswere running down his puffed cheeks. "Only youareold, Jim. You know you are."
Stainton disguised his disgust. He disengaged himself gently.
"No, I'm young, George," he said, "and young blood will have its way, you know."
Holt faced him, swaying on the curb.
"So you really mean—mean to do—to do——? You know what I mean?"
"If she will have me, I do," said Stainton, for the third time that night: "I intend to marry her."
Mrs. Preston Newberry had risen to the distinction of that name several months before Stainton, as a young Harvard undergraduate, came to know and love her sister. Very likely she had never heard of Jim until his triumphal march to New York, and certainly, if she had ever heard of him, she had long ago forgotten his name. Her early married life had completely occupied itself in an endeavour to live up to her new title, and, since this effort was not crowned with a success so secure as to dispense with the necessity of careful watching (for eternal vigilance is the price of more things than liberty), her present existence was sufficiently employed to make her regard the care of her niece with resignation rather than with joy.
Muriel's father had not survived his wife beyond a decade. In that period he managed to spend all the money that the previous portion of his mature career had been devoted to acquiring, and Muriel's grandparents on both sides had long since passed to the sphere of celestial compensations; the girl had, therefore, in some measure, been forced upon her aunt. Atimid little girl with long dark hair that nearly concealed her face, she was brought to New York.
"And now," Mrs. Newberry had remarked to her husband, "the question is: what are we to do with her?"
It may be that she had entertained from her early reading of the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward a vague hope that Preston would propose to make Muriel the child-light of their otherwise now definitely childless home. If, however, such an expectation had formed, it was speedily shattered: Preston, like many another husband, inclined to the opinion that one member of his wife's family was enough in his house. He expressed this opinion in his usual manner: briefly, but not directly.
"How the hell do I know?" he asked.
When Ethel—Ethel was really the stout Mrs. Newberry's Christian name—when Ethel had evinced a disposition to discuss in further detail the question of Muriel's future, Newberry had done what he usually did when Ethel began any discussion: he recalled an engagement at one of the three of New York's most difficult clubs.
It was a procedure that seldom failed. He disliked deciding anything, even where his own pleasures were involved; and so, he was accustomed to presenting the problem to his wife much as he presented her with an allowance, recalling an engagement at one of the clubs,going out and not returning until he was sure that Ethel had gone to bed "to sleep on it." In this way, even when the subject proved a hard mattress, Preston's couch remained downy, and Ethel would meet him, over the breakfast eggcups, with the riddle solved.
In the instance of the disposal of Muriel, the matter proceeded as always. Mrs. Newberry came downstairs next morning in her newest and pinkest kimono, an embroidered importation from Japan, whose wing-like sleeves showed plumper arms and wrists than such a garment is made to display. Though her eyes were red, she smiled.
"You won't mind paying the child's school bills?" she quavered.
"Not if the school's far enough away," said Preston.
"I had thought——" began his wife.
"Because," said Preston, "it would be wrong to the girl to bring her up at one of these New York finishing-schools. They inculcate extravagant ideals; they're full of a lot of the little children of the rich, and Muriel might acquire there a notion that she was to inherit some of my money—which she isn't."
Ethel Newberry considered this hint final. She dropped at once to the last of the dozen institutions of instruction that she had made into a mental list, and Muriel was sent to a convent school.
"Though we are not Catholics," said Mrs. Newberry.
"Excellent discipline," said Preston. "Is it far away?"
"Nearly in Philadelphia."
"Oh, well, at holiday time——"
"She can"—Ethel brightened—"she can come——"
"Yes, she can have you come to see her," said Preston.
Muriel passed eight years at this school. So long as Mrs. Newberry's conscience was able to conquer her desires, the young pupil's aunt would run over to Philadelphia for the short vacations; the long ones were, as often as could be arranged, spent by Muriel, by invitation, at the home of one or another of her classmates. Now, however, the girl had graduated and had remained as a post-graduate as long as the curriculum permitted.
"She'll have to come out," said Mrs. Newberry.
"Of the school," asked Preston, "or into society?"
"Both. The one entails the other."
"What's the hurry?"
"Good heavens, Preston; if she stays there much longer she'll become a nun!"
"Suppose she does?" asked Newberry, who was a Presbyterian. "I'm surprised to hear you refer to a pious life as if it were a smash-up."
Nevertheless, in the end, he agreed that Muriel should pass the present winter under his hospitable roof ("Though, further than that," he mentally vowed,"I'll be damned if I endure"). So, Muriel had, without too much effort on her guardians' part, been taken about with them on numerous occasions lately, most recently to the Metropolitan, where Stainton had met her.
It was on the morning after this meeting that, with commendable promptness, but at a deplorably early hour—to be exact, at eleven o'clock—Stainton called at the Newberrys'. His card was presented to Mrs. Newberry through the crack of the door while that good lady was in her bath.
Ethel, who was big, blonde, and bovine, struggled into the nearest dressing-gown and hurried to the breakfast-room, where her husband, over a newspaper, was engaged in his matutinal occupation of scolding the coffee. Her face a tragic mask, Mrs. Newberry placed the offending pasteboard by Preston's plate.
"Preston," said she. "Look at that.Lookat it!"
Newberry appeared shorter and thinner than ever as he sat crumpled over the newspaper, his grey moustache short and thin and his head covered by grey hair, short and thin and worn in a bang. He obeyed his wife's request. He expressed no surprise.
"Looks like somebody's card," he said.
"It is, Preston," wailed his wife. "It is that awful western person's that George Holt would drag to our box—ourbox—last night."
"My dear," said Newberry, "Mr.—er—what's his name?—oh, ah: Stainton;—yes—Mr. Stainton appears to be a man of means. Concerning the rich nothing except good."
"But his card, Preston; his card!"
"What's the matter with his card?"
"He has sent it up—here—at this time of day!"
"Hum. Western eccentricity, I suppose. He'll get over all that sort of thing in time."
Ethel was hopping heavily from one slippered foot to the other.
"He hasn't merely left it," she distractedly explained. "He's here—he's actually in the house."
"Well, he's not a burglar, Ethel."
"Don't talk so, Preston. I know he's not a burglar. But what does he want here at this hour?"
"I suppose he wants to see you."
"Now?Whatcan he want to seemeabout at 11 A.M.?"
"If you really want to know, my dear, I think that the best way to satisfy your curiosity is to go down and ask him."
"How can I?" She spread wide her arms, the more clearly to bring to her husband's wandering attention the fact that she was not yet by any means dressed to receive callers. "Won't you go?" she pleaded.
"Why should I?" asked Newberry. "I'mnot inthe least curious——This coffee is worse every morning. You really must have Mrs. Dawson discharge Jane."
Ethel uttered a mighty sob and fled. She sent word to Stainton that she would be down in five minutes to greet him. After half an hour, she entered the reception room. Not ten minutes later, she rushed again upon her husband, this time in the smoking room, that she called his "study."
"What on earth do you suppose he wants?" she cried.
Preston, with a face like a martyred saint's, put down his newspaper. He did not, however, take his cigarette from his mouth to reply.
"What who wants?"
Ethel wrung her hands.
"That awful man!" she said.
"Is it possible that you are referring to my friend, Mr.—er—Mr. Stainton?"
"Of course I am, Preston."
"Oh! He's still here?"
"Why, yes. I've only just seen him."
"You made him wait rather long, my dear. I hope you are not keeping him waiting again."
"What else could I do?"
"How do I know?"
"Preston, do try to show a little interest. I say: what on earth do you suppose he wants?"
"If he was as bored by that performance at theMetropolitan as I was," said Newberry, yawning, "he wants a drink. Don'tyouknow what he wants?"
"He wants—he wants," Ethel dramatically brought it out, "to take Muriel for a ride in his motor."
Preston had been seated in an arm-chair without the slightest indication of disturbing himself either for his wife or the visitor. At this announcement by Mrs. Newberry he rose with what, for him, was alacrity.
"I'll call her myself," he said.
"But, Preston! Think of it!"
"That is just what I am doing, my dear—and I think confoundedly well of it, let me tell you."
"In his motor!" Mrs. Newberry repeated the phrase as if it were pregnant with evil.
"What's the matter with his motor?" snapped Preston. "It's a motor, you say, not a monoplane. Mr.—Mr. Stainton has money enough to buy a safe motor—as motors go."
"Oh, Preston, consider: Muriel—alone—morning! The child isn't even really out yet!"
At this, Newberry fronted his wife squarely. For perhaps the first time in his life, he suffered the pains of definite assertion.
"Now, understand, Ethel," he said, "let's cut out all this rot about Muriel. The girl isnotsuch a child and she is out: she's out of school, and that's all the outing she's going to get. In fact, it's high time she was in again."
"She can't go back to the convent, Preston."
"Mr. Stainton doesn't want to motor her back to the convent. No. But if we manage things with half a hand, she needn't be much longer at large. Now, don't keep my friend Mr. Stansfield waiting any longer. I surmise that he has his machine with him?"
"He came in it. It's at the door. I couldn't see the make."
"No. Naturally. Well, his bringing it along shows him to be a man of expedition. It's what we might expect of a successful miner. And it is promising for other reasons, too. Get Muriel, take her down, hand her over to him with your blessing—but be sure you hand her over as your dearest treasure—and then come back here to me."
Saying this, Preston resumed the perusal of his newspaper.
Ethel left the room. When she returned, she had the air of seeing blood upon her hands.
"Well?" asked Preston.
"They're gone."
Preston folded the paper and laid it carefully upon the table that stood beside him. The mood of assertion still tore at his vitals.
"Now then," he began, "about this Mr. Stansfield——"
"Stainton," mildly corrected his wife as she tooka seat opposite him and looked out over the now rapidly filling Madison Avenue.
"Stainton." Newberry accepted the amendment. "What's wrong with him?"
"Oh," said Ethel, her fingers twisting in her lap, "it's not that. There's nothingwrongwith him."
"Well, then!" Preston spoke as if his wife's admission settled the matter.
But it did not settle the matter.
"Only he is not——" Ethel added: "Is he quite a gentleman?"
Newberry sighed as one sighs at a child that will not comprehend the simplest statement.
"It's hard for art to compete with Nature," said he; "a gentleman is man-made, but Nature can do better when she wants."
"We don't really know him."
"I know a good deal about him, Ethel. Enough for present purposes."
"From Mr. Holt?"
"Yes. When Holt read of his success in the papers, the canny George went to his brokers and made inquiries—thorough inquiries."
"He seems to have got whatever money he has very quickly, Preston."
"That only proves that he is either lucky or crooked. It doesn't prove he didn't get it. What makes you think he's not quite a gentleman?"
"Well," said Ethel, "——that."
"Poof!" said Newberry. "He was talking a good deal to Muriel at the opera last night. Didn't he behave all right?"
"I don't know. I suppose so. I asked her what he talked about, and she said she didn't know."
"Very sensible of her, I'm sure. I wouldn't have expected it of her. It goes to show that she's not too young to marry."
Ethel permitted herself a fat start.
"O, Preston, you never mean——"
"Now, my dear, you know very well that we've meant nothing else. You've known it ever since I sent you to call Muriel."
"And you don't think him too old for her?"
"Old? He's probably not fifty."
"Mr. Holt said he thought fifty."
"Very well: fifty. Fifty and eighteen. The one has the youth and the other supplies the balance. Most suitable. Besides, it's done every day. Heavens, Ethel, you mustn't expect everything!"
"But do you think there's nobody else, Preston? She has been away a good deal, you know, and——"
"Somebody else?"
"Yes." Ethel's eyes sought her husband's and, meeting them, fell. "Somebody that the child cares for," she murmured.
"Stuff!" said Preston. "That convent-place has ahigh reputation for the way it's conducted. Also, any man of forty can steal a girl from any boy of twenty if he only cares to try. The only trouble is that he hardly ever cares enough about it to try."
"Fifty," repeated Mrs. Newberry.
"Fifty,—granted," continued Preston. "Where we're lucky is that this fellow seems to want to try—supposing there is any other chap, and of course there isn't."
"Do you think, Preston"—Ethel's eyes were downcast—"that she can learn to love him?"
"Ethel!" said Preston.
"But, dear," Ethel insisted, "it does seem a little as if this were the sort of thing that a girl ought to be left to decide for herself."
Newberry had risen and gone to the mantelpiece to seek a fresh cigarette. His wife's words brought him to a stop. He folded his thin arms across his chest.
"Look here," he said; "we have got to face this thing right now, and once and for all. What are the facts in the case? The facts are these: Here's Muriel with a pretty face and a good, sound, sensible education of the proper homely sort, which includes a healthy ignorance of this wicked world. And here's this fellow Stainsfield, or Stainborough, or whatever his name is, and I'm sure it makes no difference, a strong, fatherly kind of old dodo, comes to New York, 'b'gosh,' with his eyes bugging out at the first good-looker they lighton. Well, he's not the Steel Trust, or a Transatlantic steamship combination, but he's what, until our palates were spoiled twenty years or so ago, we'd have called a confoundedly rich man. Understand? Then add to it that Muriel hasn't a cent of her own and no prospects—no prospects, mind you. And now see whether you'd not better forget to talk sentiment and begin to get busy. If you and Muriel don't get busy, it's a hundred-to-one shot some other girl will—and'll get him damned quick. Then Muriel will probably be left to get a job as school-teacher or something-or-other nearly as bad. He's worth a half-million if he's worth a cent."
Ethel Newberry's large, innocent eyes opened wide. If surprise can be placid, they were placidly surprised.
"Are you quite sure about the money, dear?" she asked.
Among the little company of persons aware of Jim Stainton's sentimental inclinations, or so far as were concerned the people most intimately affected by those inclinations, there appeared, thus far, to be a singular unanimity of opinion regarding the matter. Stainton, it is to be supposed, approved because the inclinations concurred with his pet theories. Newberry, although he did not know anything about Stainton's pet theories and would in all probability have jeered at them had he been enlightened, proved ready to welcome the miner because he had decided that the miner should relieve the Newberry household of a quiet presence that, its quiescence to the contrary notwithstanding, distinctly disturbed the even course of Newberry's existence. Ethel, as may be readily believed, found, under her husband's expert guidance, no difficulty in reaching the conclusion that, as she put it, "a match of this sort would be for the child's best interests."
To be sure, there was George Holt, if one counted him and his verdict. Still, even in this singularly imperfect world, where we believe in majorities and where they misgovern us, we acknowledge the purging benefitsof an ever-present party in opposition; and the party in opposition to James Stainton was now composed of Mr. George Vanvechten Holt. He was a splendid minority of one, but he was not one of those most intimately affected, and he was not generally the sort of individual noticed. Stainton had saved his life, yet even Holt admitted that the life was scarcely worth the saving.
"Not that I care anything about the youngster for her own sake," he would say, night after night, at his club, where he had made all the club-members he knew an exception to his promise of secrecy; "it's not that, and it isn't that my liking for Stainton shuts my eyes to his faults. Not a little bit. Tying up little Muriel to a man half a hundred years old is like sending virgins to that Minotaur-chap and all that sort of thing. And hitching good old Jim to a girl of eighteen is like fastening a scared bulldog to the tail of some new-fangled and unexploded naval-rocket: you don't know what's inside of it and you don't know where it's going to land; all you do know is that it's going to be mighty mystifying to the dog. Still, as I say, I'm not personal. What makes me sore is the principle of the thing. It's so rottenly unprincipled, you know."
Holt, however, always ended by declaring that he would not attempt to interfere. He intimated, darkly, that he could, if he would, interfere with considerable effect, but he was specific, if darker, in his reasonstherefor, in his decision not to attempt to save his threatened friends or fight for his outraged principles.
The truth was that George had made one more endeavour after the evening of the opera. He was severely rebuffed. Because, as he never tired of stating, he really liked Stainton and would not forget that the miner had saved his life, he recurred, after much painful plucking-up of courage, to the amatory subject, which only intoxication had permitted him so boldly to pursue on the night previous.
He was seated in Stainton's sitting-room high in the hotel. It was late afternoon; the rumble and clatter of the city rose from the distant street, and Stainton, full of fresh memories of his motor drive with Muriel, was walking backward and forward from his bedroom, slowly getting into evening clothes.
"I sure never would have thought you were morbid," said Holt, from his seat on the edge of a table, whence he dangled his legs.
"Morbid?" repeated Stainton. "I am not."
"I mean—you know: about death and old age and all that sort of thing."
"I thought I had explained all that last night."
"It must have been over when I was with you in the West."
"It wasn't."
"Not when you were the first man to volunteer togo down in the shaft of 'Better Days' mine after the explosion?"
"I have rarely been more afraid than I was then."
"Or when you played head-nurse in the spotted-fever mess at Sunnyside?"
"I was nearly sick—scared sick—myself."
Holt's patent-leather boots flashed in and out of the shadow cast by the table-edge.
"Hum," he said. "It don't seem to show a healthy state of mind, does it?"
Stainton had disappeared into his bedroom. From there his answer came, partly muffled by the half-closed door.
"I don't care to talk any more about it. I made my explanation to you last night, because I had promised to make one. That's all."
"I'm afraid I was a bit illuminated last night," said Holt.
"You were."
"Still, you know, I knew what I was saying."
Stainton did not reply.
"And what I said," Holt supplemented, "is what I think now and what I always will think."
"Very well. Let it go at that, George."
Holt made a mighty effort.
"The plain truth is," said he, "that people will call you an old fool to buy a piece of undressed kid."
Stainton's bulky figure filled the doorway. He wasin his shirt-sleeves, his hands busy with the collar-button at the back of his neck.
"That will do," he said.
"I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings——" said Holt.
"Then keep quiet."
"But you ought to know what people will say. Someone's got to tell you."
"I don't care what people will say."
"They'll say——"
Stainton advanced. His hands were now at his side, idle, but his face was completely calm.
"Never mind," he said.
"They'll say," concluded Holt, "that you're buying the little girl, and that you've been cheated in the transaction——"
Stainton's hands were raised. They descended heavily upon Holt's shoulders. They plucked Holt from his perch and shook him until his teeth chattered. Then they dropped him, rather gently, into a chair.
"Now," said Stainton. His face was firm, and there was a cold blue flame playing from under his brows, but he was not even breathing hard. "Now, let this end it. If you want to be my friend, let this end your comments on my personal affairs. If you do not want to be my friend, go on talking as you have been, and I will throw you out of the window."
This incident partially accounts for Holt's resoluterefusal thereafter to advise Stainton. Advise him further George certainly did not, although among his club-fellows he expressed himself as extremely anxious to have it remembered that, should anything go wrong with Stainton, George Holt had predicted as much.
There remained, however, one person of importance to Stainton's project that still remained unconsulted and might have some opinion of more or less weight in regard to it. This was Muriel Stannard.
What she thought, or what she would ultimately come to feel about his plan, did occupy space in Stainton's cogitations. Notwithstanding his romanticism, Stainton was not so blind to fact as to fail to see that the girl's mind was as virgin as her body. Indeed, her brain, so far as her education might be said to have developed that organ, was less advanced than the rest of her physique, and this not because she was not intelligent, for now that she was in the world at last he could see her daily hastening toward mental maturity, but because her pastors and masters had brought her up in the manner supposed to be correct for girls of her position. Critics of that manner might say that its directors proceed on the theory that, since life is full of serpents, the best way to train children for life is not to teach them to distinguish between harmless and venomous reptiles, but to keep them in such ignorance of the snakes that they will be sure not to know one when they see it. Yet Stainton, anythingrather than a critic of the established order, found himself not displeased with this manifestation—or lack of it. He wanted youth; he wanted his long lost, long postponed romance, and chance had put both these things within his reach in the person of this dusky-eyed girl. Physically she was what her mother had been, mentally she could be trained to complete resemblance. He would make of her what he conceived to be the best. And so he loved her.
To ascertain her opinion, to predetermine it, Stainton was now elaborately preparing. Beginning with that introductory motor ride, in which Stainton's cautious manipulation of the automobile seemed to Muriel's unspoiled delight a union of skill and daring, he went about his courtship in what he believed a frank and regular way; in a way that both Preston and Ethel Newberry considered absolutely committal; in a way that, consider it as she might, Muriel accepted with every evidence of girlish pleasure.
There were more motor drives, with the aunt now playing chaperon: a chaperon that conscientiously chaperoned as little as possible. There were small theatre parties, small suppers, small dinners. One or two mothers of daughters, who dared to be civil to Stainton, were shooed away, attacked by Ethel with all the brazen loyalty of a ponderous hen defending her chicks from the assault of a terrier. The Newberrys, as in duty bound, retaliated upon Stainton'stheatres, dinners, and suppers with two teas and a luncheon. Stainton "came back at them," as George Holt phrased it, with more suppers, theatres, and dinners, the dramas always carefully selected to suit the immature condition of Muriel's soul; and so the whole courtship progressed along those conventional lines which lay the road to the altar over a plain of rich foods irrigated by vintage wines.
"Do you like this sort of thing?" Stainton heard himself asking the girl during one of the morning walks that he was permitted to take with her, unescorted, through Central Park.
"What sort of thing?" asked Muriel. "A day like this? I love it!"
It was a day worthy of being loved: one of those crisp autumnal days when New York is at its best and when the air, from the earth to the clear blue zenith, has a crystal clarity and a bracing tang that none other of the world's great cities possesses. Stainton felt as he used on some Rocky Mountain peak with the crests of lower eminences rolling away to the horizon like the waves of an inland sea below him; and Muriel, her cheeks glowing, walked by his side more like some firm-breasted nymph of those forests than a child of modern days and metropolitan civilisation.
"Yes," said Stainton, "this is splendid. But I meant the whole thing: New York, the life here, the city."
"I love that, too," said Muriel.
To Stainton's ear the use of one's first Latin verb translated was not merely schoolgirl carelessness and want of variety of phrase; it was an accurate expression of her abounding capacity for intense affection, her splendid fortune of emotion and her equally splendid generosity in its disposal.
"So do I," he said. "You can't begin to know how much it means to me to get back here."
"From the West?" Her eyes were soft at this. "But the West must be so romantic."
"Scarcely that. It has its points, but romance is not one of them."
"Oh, but your life there was romantic." She nodded wisely. "I know," she said.
Stainton's smile was tenderly indulgent.
"How did you get that idea?" he asked.
"Auntie Ethel has told me some of the brave things you did, and so has Uncle Preston."
"They have been reading some of the silly stories that the papers published when I made my big find. You mustn't believe all that the newspapers say."
"I believe these things," affirmed Muriel. "Wasn't that true about the time you rescued the man from the lynchers at Grand Junction?"
"Grand Joining. I didn't read it," said Stainton.
"But did you do it?"
"Oh, there was something of the sort." He honestlydisliked to have his supposedly heroic exploits praised, only from modesty perhaps, perhaps from a super-sensitive consciousness that they were the results rather of fear than of bravery. "Look at that sky. Isn't it glorious?"
"Then about the express robbery on the Rio Grande," said Muriel; "they said you went after the robbers when the sheriff and his men were afraid to go, and you captured them by yourself—three of them."
Stainton laughed, his broad, white teeth showing.
"The sheriff and his men," he said, "were along with me. It was not half so exciting as that play last night. Didn't you like the play?"
"I loved it. But, Mr. Stainton——"
"Yes?"
"Won't you tell me about some of these things?"
"I am sure they are much more interesting in the form in which the newspapers presented them."
"I always wanted to see a mine. Surely a mine must be lovely. Please tell me about a mine."
He tried to tell her, but mining had been to him only a means to an end and, the end now being attained, mining struck him as a dull subject. He abruptly concluded by telling her so.
"Besides," he said, "it is merely a business: a mere business, like any other. What can girls and women care for business?"
So he brought back the conversation to the play that they had seen the night before. He discussed the plot with her, the plot having no relation to business, or to anything else approaching actuality for that matter, his iron-grey eyes all the while eagerly feeding on her beauty and her youth.
"You think," he asked, "that the Duchess should not have tried to break off the match?"
"Just because Arthur was young and poor?" inquired Muriel. "Of course I think she shouldn't. He was far too nice for her daughter anyway."
"But there was the suspicion that he had cheated at cards. Lord Eustace had told her so."
"She didn't really believe that; she only wanted to believe it. I think she was horrid."
"And her daughter, Lady—Lady——" He hesitated for the name.
"Lady Gladys," supplied Muriel. "I think she was horrid, too. To give up Arthur like that!"
Stainton smiled gravely.
"You would not have done it, Miss Stannard?"
"Indeed I would not!"
"Whatwouldyou have done?"
Muriel's chin became resolute.
"I should have gone right up to him before them all there in the drawing-room, and I should have put my——" She broke off, rosy with embarrassment. "You will think I am awfully silly," she said.
But Stainton did not think so. He urged her on.
"No, you will laugh," said Muriel.
"I should not," he answered her. "I really want to know."
Nevertheless, the illusion of the theatre, which her memory had partially renewed, her self-consciousness finally dispelled, and her conclusion was in lame contrast to her beginning:
"I should just have married him in spite of them all."
Of such material was Stainton's wooing made. Though it may seem but poor stuff to you, it did not seem so to those who wove it, and it was, if you will but reflect upon your own, the material generally in vogue.
Our modern method of courting is, of course, the most artificial phase of modern artificial life. The period of courtship is, for most lovers, what Sunday used to be for the small boy in the orthodox family of the early 'seventies. As he then put on his best clothes for the Sabbath, our men and women now put on their best manners for the courting. As he then put off his real self at church-time, they now lay aside, for this supposedly romantic interlude in an existence presently to return to the acknowledged prosaic, all their crudities. It was thus with Muriel and Stainton.
Not that the latter meant to appear other than he was. His great Plan presumed, indeed, quite the reverse. He was intent that Muriel should admire nothis wealth or his reputation, but his inherent worth and the genuine basis for his reputation. He was resolved that she should love not any or all of the things that he might be, but the one thing, the real self, that he had himself made. His fault, according to the prevailing standards, if any fault resulted, consisted only in his insistence upon a too introspectively observed ideal of just what that thing happened to be.
Nor yet, and this is likewise intrinsic, would the severest scrutiny have revealed in Muriel any realisation of a pose upon her own part. Her aunt, trusting as do most guardians of youth to a natural intuition in the ward, which has no standing in fact, refrained from informing the girl in plain language what it was that Stainton wanted. Mrs. Newberry's fears were ungrounded: the conventional calm had not been disturbed, and Muriel, save for timid smiles at the butcher's boy when he called at the school and furtive glances at the acolytes in church, had never yet known love. Not guessing the truth, Muriel was merely, for the first time, being accorded a glimpse of those kingdoms of this world of which all schoolgirls have had their stolen dreams. With what she saw she was frankly delighted, and when a pretty young girl is frankly delighted, a pretty young girl is obviously not at her worst.
"You look very happy nowadays," said Mrs. Newberry at the luncheon-table, looking, however, not atthe subject of her remarks but at the master of her affections, who, chancing to be lunching at home, sat opposite her.
"I am, Aunt Ethel," said Muriel. "I always have been happy, but I am happier than ever now."
Mrs. Newberry smiled meaningly at Preston, but Muriel could not see the smile, and Preston would not.
"Why is that?" asked Ethel.
"Oh, because."
"Because why?"
"Because I am seeing so much. The city, you know, and these suppers and things. Sitting up until to-morrow. And I do so love the theatres!"
Ethel's smile faded.
"Yes," she said, "Mr. Stainton is very kind."
"And generous," put in Preston so unexpectedly that his wife jumped. "Thompson; the salmon."
"I think he's lovely," said Muriel.
"Do you?" Mrs. Newberry was bovine even in her playful moods. "He does really run about like a boy, doesn't he?"
"Well," said Muriel, "I wouldn't sayjustlike a boy."
"He seems quite young—he actually seems very young indeed," mused Ethel.
"Seems?" said Preston. "He is."
His positive tone startled Mrs. Newberry into indiscretion.
"He is fif——" she began, then, catching her husband's eye, she corrected herself: "He must be nearly——"
"He is forty," said Newberry, scowling.
"Oh, Uncle Preston," protested Muriel, "Mr. Holt said——"
"George Holt is a fool," said Newberry, "and always was."
"Your uncle is quite right, Muriel," said Ethel. "Mr. Holt does gossip. Besides, he is not the sort of person a young girl should quote."
"You quote him, Aunt Ethel—often."
"Your aunt," said Preston, "is not a young girl. Mr. Stainton is younger than Holt, I dare say, for he has evidently taken good care of himself, and Holt never takes care of anything, least of all his health."
The air of importance that her uncle and aunt seemed to attach to so trivial a matter as a few years more or less in the age of any man past thirty puzzled Muriel, and she betrayed her bewilderment.
"I don't see how it much matters," she said, "whether he's forty or fifty."
"It doesn't matter in the least," said Newberry. "But you had better make the most of him while you can."
"I don't see why," said Muriel.
"Because he is popular," Preston explained. "Thereare several women—women andgirls—anxious to marry him, and one or other of them is sure to succeed."
Muriel winced. She did not relish the thought of losing her new friend, and she wondered why, if he were really sought after in marriage, he had so much time to devote to her and her aunt and uncle, and why he spoke so little of women to her.
Stainton, indeed, held his tongue about his intentions for just the length of time that, as he had previously concluded, a man must hold his tongue in such matters. If, in the meantime, Muriel heard from both of the Newberrys more interesting stories of his career in the West, and was impressed thereby, if she got from the same reliable source equally romantic accounts of his wealth and was, as the best of us could not in like circumstances help being, a little impressed by these as well, she was, nevertheless, honestly unprepared for his final declaration. She regarded Stainton as a storybook hero, the more so since his conversation never approached the sentimental, and she delighted in his company for the "good time"—it was thus that she described it—which he was "showing her."
In brief, she was at last ready to fall in love with Stainton. Stainton was in love.