"She laid her hand tremblingly upon the old man's arm."
He cleared his throat. "She has made her bed, Abbie," he said in a husky tone, "and now she must lie on it."
"No, father; you must hear what Burt says. He has had to go up there and—"
"Burt? Is that where he has been this morning? Has he turned against me too? Good God! what have I done to deserve such treatment as this? First it's Mark, with his drawing and his trying to play the fiddle; and then it's this pen-pusher that puts on those things Sundays and marches around singing songs; and now it's Burt, who's had every chance to make a good business-man of himself, and everything done for him. It's too bad; it's too almighty bad."
Abbie steadied herself against the corner of the table. Her breast heaved with fearfulness; she had never before openly protested to her father against himself.
"Why haven't you done anything for the others? Why didn't you give Mark an education?—the kind, I mean, that would have helped him, and the only kind. Why haven't you taken this Mr.—Mayme's hus—this man and made the best of it, and found something for him to do?—he can work in an office. Oh, father," she moaned, with a softening note of deprecation, "you have made it pretty hard for all of us."
"Abbie," he gasped, "are you turning against me too? Abbie, I've always thought so much of you, and I've done well by you. But I want you to go away—I won't see her. I won't. She must go away, and you too."
He caught her by the arm and tried to move her towards the door—gently, as if she might go of her own accord.
Ogden, on coming in from lunch, found himself intercepted by Freddy Pratt. This youth had a few moments' leisure, and he assailed Ogden between the wardrobe and the wash-stand.
"I went over to see the Viberts again; last night," he communicated. "Poor Mayme—I wasn't going back on her, if others did. She was sitting there all alone in the dark. I guess she had been crying. Anyway, when I lit the gas her eyes looked red. She wouldn't say much—"
"Good plan."
"And after he came in she wouldn't say hardly anything at all. Slow work talking tohim!He wasn't drunk exactly, but he had been drinking; didn't need a light to tell that. I wasn't doing anything at all, and all of a sudden he blurted out, 'I say, you young fellow you, what do you mean by coming here and destroying the peace of a man's family?' You can bet I was taken back. Then he got up and came towards me—he looked big, too! 'You get out of here'—that's what he said."
"And did you?"
"Oh, yes, I got out," responded Freddy Pratt, with a meek complacency.
"You surprise me. You showed sense."
Freddy looked at him doubtfully. "I heard this morning that he had just lost his place with those insurance people," he resumed cautiously. "That was what was the matter, I guess."
"Possibly," said George, who had heard from Brower that something of the kind was likely to occur. The fellow's work had been done indifferently of late, and he was far from being worth the increased salary he had asked for.
As Ogden passed up to the other end of the office Brainard appeared in the doorway of the directors' room and beckoned to him. His face was pale and disturbed; the veins in the end of his nose showed redly; his eyes burned with an appealing fierceness.
"Ogden," he said, in a loud, hoarse whisper, "where is that type-writer girl? Tell her to bring some water here as quick as she can."
"She isn't here, sir; she has gone back upstairs."
"Then you get some yourself. Here; take this tumbler. Be quick, and don't make any fuss."
Ogden hastened to the wash-stand near which Freddy Pratt had detained him. Returning again, he saw through the half-open door that Abbie Brainard was lying back in one of the big chairs with her face pallid and her eyes closed.
Her father dipped two of his great, clumsy fingers into the glass and made an awkward attempt to sprinkle her face. "My poor girl has fainted," he said.
The girl's eyes half opened; she seemed to see Ogden standing just outside.
She clutched both arms of the chair and raised herself half up. Her bosom heaved; her mouth was drawn tensely.
"Fainted?" she tried to say; "not at all!" She gasped once or twice and rose to her feet. "I never fainted in my life," she said grandly; "I never should think of doing such a thing!"
She reeled; her eyes closed. George rushed forward to catch her. Her hand dropped numb on his arm, and her head fell heavily on his shoulder.
Ogden and his mother were now beginning to have frequent conferences with regard to the management of the property and to McDowell's connection with the matter. Perhaps the word "conference" puts, however, too set and formal a stamp on the brief, hap-hazard interchanges of ideas that took place, as chance permitted, within McDowell's own house—a few words after a Sunday dinner or at the front door late at night. And besides being handicapped as to occasion, they were further hampered by McDowell's new relation to them and by their own presence under his roof. Besides, Mrs. Ogden, with a multitude of small experiences, had no ability for grasping things in a large and general way; while George, with a broader and more comprehensive outlook, was embarrassed by a lack of experience in the actual details of business transactions. Added to this, he was a new-comer, under all a new-comer's disadvantages; he hardly knew where to turn for the proper agents, legal or financial, that might have been employed; while many of the agencies—courts, for instance—were different in procedure and even, in name from anything he had known East.
"All the same, though," he said to his mother, "things ought to be in different shape for you. I'm bound hand and foot in that bank—no time or thought for anything outside. I don't know but what you'd better put everything with some good real-estate firm, and let them look after repairs and collections and taxes."
His mother fixed a pair of anxious eyes upon him, and the wrinkles of perplexity appeared on her forehead.
"Eugene is real-estate."
"Or those lawyers," he went on. "Anyway, you ought to have an account as administratrix with some bank. I believe I'll open one to-morrow. Something has got to be done to make things quicker and clearer."
He presently took upon himself the delicate task of intimating to McDowell that a simpler and more regular way of doing things was desired.
He went up to McDowell's office in the latter part of the afternoon. As he entered, a tall, dark man was standing in the middle of the room. There was a sinister look in his eyes and a contemptuously sarcastic smile on his heavy red lips. He gave a last fold to a small piece of paper that he held in his hands and thrust it into his vest pocket. It was Vibert.
"It's pretty near four now," he was saying to McDowell, "so I can't try again to-day; but I expect to find this all right after ten to-morrow morning."
He gave his hand a hardy flip across one side of his dark moustache and passed out. McDowell looked after him sourly. "Damn the brute!" he muttered.
As Vibert's words implied, he had been in McDowell's office once before on the same day. His salary at St. Asaph's now meant more to him than it had meant a month ago, and he had called with reference to it and to the delay in its payment. Hitherto, the financial arrangements of the church had gone on with the same precision as its anthems and its processionals. In the present condition of things delay to Vibert was more than a surprise, more than an embarrassment; it was an exasperation.
"I don't sing for glory," he had declared with an offensive brusqueness. "It's the here and not the hereafter that I'm busy with."
McDowell looked at him uneasily. "I'm going to fix up all the salaries next week in one batch. I don't see why any particular man should be favored."
"Favored!" repeated Vibert, with a loud insolence. "I should say not. I don't feel favored in running my legs off for money three weeks overdue. We can't live on air. We have bills to pay. We ain't singing for the pleasure of it."
McDowell contracted his eyes to a critical narrowness. "You may not be singing much longer for anything else, either."
"That's another matter; it isn't you that put the choir together."
McDowell tapped his fingers on the yellow varnish of his desk. "I don't know about that. From what I hear, you're not making the sort of record for yourself that's useful in a church."
"My private life is nobody's business. I sing; I'm worth the money."
"That may work on the stage; it won't work quite so close to the pulpit. Come, now; I know a little something of your daily doings. Plenty of men sing whodon'thang around race-tracks and loaf in pool-rooms. And, from what I hear, you're helping that young Brainard along at a good gait, too. You'd better wait—along with the others."
"Waiting be hanged! I'm here for money—money that's mine. If I can't work it with the man who pays out the loaves and fishes, I'll try one of the men that contribute them, in the first place." He tossed his head insultingly towards the door that led to Ingles's office.
McDowell's elbow rested on the edge of his desk (his thumb on the tip of his ear and his middle finger rubbing his farther eyebrow) as he looked out steadily on Vibert from under his hand. "Joseph," he called to his clerk, "bring me that check-book."
"He looked steadily on Vibert from under his hand."
The man opened a lower drawer and brought out a book whose covers enclosed a number of stubs and three or four blank checks.
McDowell wrote and passed the check to Vibert, who went out with no further words on either side.
McDowell did some figuring and saw some people, and somewhat later Vibert returned. He threw his check on McDowell's desk contemptuously. "That's no good."
"How's that?"
"No account with 'em."
"No ac—oh, I see. We've changed banks, and I forgot to change the name in the check." He picked up a ruler and drew the red-ink-bottle a little nearer. "I'll fix it. Sorry to have troubled you. We want to look out for this, Joseph."
Vibert withdrew, speaking the words that Ogden had heard on his entrance—words that would have been the reverse of assuring if he had fully understood them. "Bad egg," said McDowell to him, wagging his head in the direction of the just closed door.
George looked at him studiously. He appeared to be in a state of extreme nervous irritation. His wiry moustache moved up and down stiffly as he felt about with, his teeth for the inner membrane of his lips. His long, lean fingers were interlaced, and a clicking sound came from his snapping his finger-nails together. It was clearly no occasion for more than a partial statement of Ogden's matter, and this was the most that he permitted himself.
But McDowell was in the sensitive state of mind when one word does the work of three, and in the irritable state of mind when talk is such a relief that three words evoke thirty in reply. He met George's brief and modest suggestions with a hitching of his shoulders, and answered them in a harsh and strident tone.
"The first thing in doing business," he said, "is to have an office to do it in." He looked about his own—his desks, his cashier's window, his letter-press. "And the second is to know how to do it." He looked out of the window in a wholly impersonal way, but his words had a more personal slant than he would have given them at almost any other time. "Gad knows I've got enough to do already, but Kittie's affairs are mine. She has equal interests with the others, and she seems to feel that I am able and willing to look after them."
He spoke with some show of reason, and George was obliged so to concede.
"There's taxes, for one thing. Or, take special assessments alone; they're almost a business by themselves. Say you've got ten acres or so just beyond the limits. Some fine day it's six hundred dollars or more for half a mile of side-walk—a sidewalk that won't be walked on by seven people a week. What's the reason? Oh, some one of those township politicians or other has got a friend that's a carpenter. Now, who's going to tackle the boards and stave off such things?"
George looked at him silently.
"There's tax-sales—I guess you never went to one of them. You'd strike a bloodthirsty crew if you did. Supposing you've got a mortgage, and the mortgager don't come to time with his taxes? You've got to buy 'em up to protect yourself. And you've got to get there first. Last year I fought this point for a week with one of those tax-sharks. And so it goes. Real estate is no kindergarten business, I can tell you."
The truth of this view was becoming more and more apparent to Ogden. He withdrew, after some further parleyings, in a confused and inconclusive state of mind—well convinced, however, of McDowell's abilities and more fully conscious of McDowell's position as the husband of his father's daughter. Never did the town of his adoption seem less, indeed, like a kindergarten than when he took his way northward to dinner, or when, later in the early evening, he made his way over to the West Side to call at the Brainards. The thousands of acres of ramshackle that made up the bulk of the city, and the tens of thousands of raw and ugly and half-built prairie that composed its environs, seemed together to constitute a great checker-board over whose squares of "section" and "township" keenness and rapacity played their daring and wary game. And through the middle of the board ran a line, a hinge, a crack—the same line that loomed up in ad those various deeds and abstracts of his with the portentousness and unescapability of the equator—the "line of the third principal meridian."
The Brainard house reared itself in the same frivolous ugliness that we have already viewed; but an excess of light came through the front parlor windows, and Ogden was prepared to find that at least four of the eight burners in the big chandelier were lighted. This turned out to be the case; it was as great a tribute as the family ordinarily paid to society. The family he found represented by Brainard, his wife, and his elder daughter; society was present in the shape of a young couple who were called Mr. and Mrs. Valentine.
The elder daughter received him with a quiet and simple cordiality. He could not help looking about furtively for the possible presence of the younger. He had not remained ignorant of her half-hour wait in a cab outside the bank; but he might have surmised the inflexibility of her father's will. The old man had refused to see her or to let her see him; the most that he would yield was a species of non-committal communication through Burt.
Mrs. Brainard presented herself to Ogden as a peculiarly faded and ineffective person; it was easy enough to grant her an abysmal incapacity. Her husband, in fact, had fallen upon her, crushed her, absorbed her—as a heavy blotting-pad falls on a page of light and delicate writing. Except for one thing she had no aim, no occupation, no diversion—beyond her ills and remedies. This was a penchant for chess. To those who object that chess is an intellectual game, one may simply put the question: have you ever seen it taken up by an elderly, invalided female who has rested content with a mere learning of the moves? It was thus with Mrs. Brainard; she played a good many games with herself every day, and they really soothed and rested her.
On the social board, however, she had hardly learned the first "opening," and the entertainment of the brilliant young couple now in her house fell almost altogether on Abbie; for the girl's mother sank back into a passive silence, while her father toured through the rooms occasionally, and threw out remarks, more or lessà propos, in a gruff and abrupt fashion peculiar to himself.
His manner with young men had simply closed the house to them. To him it was an inexplicable and harassing thing that a young fellow of twenty-five should not possess the capacity, experience, and accumulations of a man of thirty-five or forty. He regarded every intruder in the light of a potential son-in-law, and no more potential than undesirable. Most of these callers would gulp down once, with such smile as they could master, the old man's abrupt ways and disconcerting comments; then they got out of the house in good order and never came back. However, at the present juncture he did not appear to resent Ogden's appearance—notwithstanding the young man's share in the episode at the bank; perhaps he looked upon him as a serviceable prop in another bad quarter of an hour.
"Yes, Mr. Brainard," Mrs. Valentine was saying, as George entered, "it's just as I have been telling Abbie; you ought to move over on the North Side, too."
Brainard happened to be passing through the room; it had occurred to him that he might turn down one of the side-burners in the back parlor.
"Um, no," he said, in an off-hand way; "too near the lake: fog; damp; rheumatism."
"And pneumonia too, perhaps," his wife suggested feebly.
"I'll risk it!" cried Mrs. Valentine, vivaciously. She had an expansive and affluent effect; she appeared mettlesome, decisive, confident. "It seemed to me that, so long as I was going to build, I might as well make a complete sweep—an out-and-out break. I've always had a fancy for that part of town. So I sent Adrian around to the different offices—"
She threw a look of passing reference towards her husband, who made a little bow in return.
"—and I had the good luck to get a lot on Bellevue Place—one of the last left, and only a block from the Lake Shore drive. Then I went to Mr. Atwater, and he has made my house a perfect little dream! I thought it best to have him to dinner once or twice, and I'm glad I did--he's been so interested all through. There hasn't been the least hitch to speak of, and I expect to get in within a fortnight. This," she went on, turning to Ogden with an undiminished vivacity, "is really my P. P. C."
Ogden glanced at the husband of the lady whose use of the first person singular was so frank and continuous. He was a young man with a pleasant and amiable face, and that face was set in a meek little smile, from whose forced lines the element of deception was most pitifully lacking.
"Yes, Abbie dear," Mrs. Valentine went on, "I'm afraid it's good-by—or nearly the same thing." She took the girl's hand within her own and gave it repeated pats in a rather careless and self-absorbed way. "I shall try to see you often, of course; but it will be so far. How nice it would be if you could only come up there and settle down right next door to me."
Ogden sighed unconsciously. He had fancied the first rays of social illumination as falling upon this benighted family; but it was only the last faint glow of a Speeding twilight, after all.
Abbie withdrewherhand with a quiet dignity; she seemed to put but a moderate value on these protestations.
"I believe we are satisfied where we are, Fanny," she said in a low and even tone. "We have always lived here; we feel more at home in this house than we could anywhere else. All our—all our—friends are near us"—a desolate little blush came in here—"and then there's the church and everything. I've heard my sis—I'm told that the North Side is very pleasant on some accounts, but I don't think we are likely ever to change."
"Change!" called her father, suddenly. "I wouldn't live anywhere else if you paid me to. What's better than this?"
"So attached," murmured her mother, vaguely.
Mrs. Valentine continued for some time further to flutter her hands, her clothing, and her conversation, but she was very slow about getting up and fluttering away. She was a neighbor, and her return home was a matter of three minutes. Ogden's return was a matter of nearly an hour, and he left first. He carried away the discontented feeling of a young man whose aim in the direction of a young woman is frustrated by the presence of uncongenial elders and irrelevant outsiders. He had been quite certain of his ability to meet Abbie Brainard after the bank episode without any particular embarrassment or restraint; certainly he had come to view with more interest a girl whose hand had lain in his and whose head had rested on his shoulder. There had been no embarrassment in her greeting of him; her manner had been as straightforward and sensible as it always was. But never mind; he should try again; he was only too certain of soon finding her alone.
He took his hour through the clamor and the slime of the public ways. He escaped from these by his talismanic night-key, and stumbled up thoughtfully to his room.
There was a light burning in it, and the fireplace showed the faint red of dying coals. A valise, open and half unpacked, stood in the middle of the floor, and sitting up in bed was Brower, busy with the last volume of "Monte Cristo." They now occupied a large front room together, which Ogden had to himself a good half of the time.
"Back, are you?" said George. "When did you get in?"
"About seven."
"How's Missouri?"
"Weather good; eating bad."
"Heading all this time?"
"Went to theatre."
"What did you see?"
"'Crackling of Thorns.'"
"Any good?"
"Hot much; one pretty girl. Where haveyoubeen?"
"West Side; Brainard's."
"Anybody there?"
"The old people. And some friends—Valentines."
"Valentine? I used to know a Valentine—nice, quiet fellow, light complexion. His name was Alpheus—no, Adrian."
"That's the one."
"Poor fellow! he deserved a better fate."
"What's the matter with him?"
"His wife owns him."
George smiled. Brower hitched himself up on his pillow and put his finger into the book to keep the place. "He was a first-rate fellow —good all through and kind of capable; that is, he was worth a salary of eighteen hundred a year—or two thousand. He married a girl with two thousand a month. No head book-keeper, no cashier, no secretary could she let him be after that; no, Johnny must be his own master—except as regarded her. To-day he sort o' hangs on the outskirts of business, and picks up a little here and a little there—he has desk-room somewhere in the Clifton, I believe. He does the best he can to preserve his self-respect, but I don't see how he can pay the bills and the house-rent too."
"House-rent? They're building—I mean,sheis."
"Yaugh!" cried Brower, with deep meaning.
"Atwater's doing the house for them—for her."
"Atwater?" Brower gave a second hitch to the pillow, and threw the book to the foot of the bed. "He's another. He's had a trip in the same boat."
"Why, he isn't married."
"I guess he is—just about as hard as any man ever was. But he has fought through gallantly—I'll say that for him."
"What'shisstory?"
"Begins in the same way. She was rich, too, and a high-flyer. He had education and family and his profession—and no money. He struggled up for ten years, and now—now he stands on his own legs; his wife has her own money for her clothes and amusements. He saw he had got to strike society, and he struck it—hard; he costs like smoke. But he snatched victory from defeat. It was a great act. Speaking of acts—who do you think I saw there in a stage-box to-night?"
"Who?"
"Burt Brainard. Just kick that valise out of the way if you want to."
"All alone?"
"Hope. Girl with him. One of the Clifton type-writers—the one who used to be down in the lunch-room."
"Healie McNabb?"
"U'm h'm."
McDowell's second check to Vibert proved good on the opening of business next morning. It was paid in the usual mechanical and impersonal fashion that gives no possible clue to the amount of the balance remaining after; but paid it was, all the same, and Vibert's anticipated opportunity for further invective—an opportunity which he considered quite possible, and would have been by no means sorry to embrace—came to naught.
McDowell's friendly intimation that St. Asaph's might presently dispense with Vibert's services was soon found to have as solid a backing as his signature. Within less than a fortnight Vibert was dismissed, though on grounds not altogether the same as those that McDowell had figured upon.
If Vibert, after descending to the ground floor, had immediately crossed the great court of the Clifton instead of lingering there for a moment, the outcome might have been quite different. But he paused in the midst of its mosaicked expanse to pull out the check from his pocket and to take another look at it. He projected his vision so far into the future as the next forenoon, and saw the check again rejected—this time by the teller of the Highflyers'—by reason of "no account," or perhaps by reason of "no funds." He dramatized a precipitous visit to McDowell's office, and improvised the scene of denunciation and vigorous action that was to accompany it.
"It had better be good this time," he muttered, with his eyes on the pavement. "I'll strangle him if it ain't."
He tossed up his head and sent a fierce and frowning glance through one of the great plates of French glass that shut in the court. His eye darted forward on its own level, but it saw nothing save McDowell in his office, ten or twelve floors above.
Most of the panes that enclosed this central space were of great height and breadth, and were lettered with the silvered styles and titles of various railroad and mining companies; others, smaller, gave light and some ventilation to a few booth-like shops; a few others, immovable half-lights, admitted a little daylight and no air at all to certain closet-like crannies that had a squeezed and crowded rôle in the Clifton's general economy. One of these last looked out from under a kind of secondary stairway; it lighted the scullery of the Acme Lunch Room, and it commanded a view of that side of the court on which Vibert was standing.
Vibert's heel gave a vicious dig into the mosaic pavement and made a quick and rasping turn towards the exit; he crossed the court with a heavy yet rapid stride, and passed out into the street. He was quite unconscious of observation, but he had been seen.
Through the half-pane under the stairway a young woman had noted his presence and witnessed his departure. She was a thin, faded creature, in the forlorn garments of an undisguisable poverty. All but the faintest traces of good looks seemed to have been taken from her by a long experience with illness and suffering. She stood close against the pane. Her thin fingers, red and chapped, showed, as they pressed against the glass, the crinkled puffiness that comes from long immersion in hot water, and she stared through with a look of mingled fear, entreaty, and agony. At the glance which Vibert's indignation over McDowell's trickery sent in her direction, she started and cowered like one who had encountered that glance before; and when he turned to go she recovered herself, and flung her bosom and her hands against the pane as if bent upon breaking through and following him.
A moment later she appeared in the court; she had put on a shabby hat and a flimsy, faded shawl. She crossed over hastily, and approached the head of the elevator squad.
"The tall, dark man who just went out—you saw him?" she inquired hurriedly. She spoke in two quick-expulsions of the breath, and seemed left without a third.
"Um?" The man opposed his gold band and gilt buttons to her forlorn and bedraggled shabbiness. His brief inquiry, made without opening his lips, had the true official indifference; but it caused his questioner to feel some of the disadvantage that comes to a young woman from a public and impulsive inquiry after a young man.
"You saw him standing over there; he had a paper in his hand. Tell me, does he work in this building?" She was panting and all a-tremble, but she found breath for these words and will to use it.
"Yes, I saw him," the man answered, with the slow reluctance of his kind to be interested in individuals as individuals. "Used to work here, I believe. Haven't seen much of him lately."
"Where can I find him?"
The man turned towards the elevators; one had just that minute come down. "Chicago!" its youthful conductor had called with an airy drawl.
"Pete," said his superior; "a tall, dark man who's been standing around here." He threw his thumb over towards the girl, to indicate that the inquiry was hers. "Had on a soft brown hat."
"Yes, I seen him," said the boy. "Used to be in one of them insurance offices, didn't he? Vibert—was that his name?"
"Vi—?"
"Vibert," said the man, impatiently. "Come, come, don't block the way—sev-en!" he cried, in his professional tone, and the boy at once slammed his door to and started roofwards.
The man retired into himself with a resumption of his air of idle dignity. The girl, at a short remove, stood looking at him with an anxious face. She made a timid attempt to approach him again and presently stole away.
Vibert was followed down from McDowell's office, in the course of half an hour, by Ogden. McDowell's dissertation on tax matters, with its pointed presentation of extreme cases, had left him, as we have seen, in a state more or less stirred up; and it had occurred to him that if he were to stop on the way down he might find some legal sedative in the office of Freeze & Freeze. But the hour was now rather late; Freeze & Freeze were being locked up by the last of their junior clerks; and Ogden was left to ramble through the corridors in a confused and disconsolate state.
He was presently accosted by a young woman, who appeared to be roaming through the building in a state even more dazed and forlorn than his own. She approached him with appeal so plainly written on her features that his hand went instinctively to his pocket for the ready dime. He was used to addresses of this sort; Brower had told him many times that he was a "soft mark." He soon ascertained, however, that what she wanted was not alms, but information—an appeal which is more familiar still in the great down-town buildings; it comes frequently enough from simple, inexperienced creatures who know what they want, but not at all how to get it.
The girl thrust back a straggling lock and gave him a glance both wild and timid.
"Please, sir," she said, "do you know any one in this building named Vibert—in an insurance office?" She pronounced the name with an effort of overcoming its strangeness.
There was a certain primitiveness in her speech; it was provincial, rustic—a fine ear might have called it uncouth.
Ogden was struck with her plaintive "please, sir." He had never before heard that literary form of speech in actual use.
"Well," he said, with the unceremonious kindness proper to the occasion and person, "I think you can learn something about him in the office of the Vesuvian—next floor below."
"Oh, thank you, sir!" She made a movement suggestive of an abbreviated courtesy; it was as much in the way of acknowledgment as her sense of strangeness and confusion of mind appeared to permit.
"The girl gave him a glance, wild and timid."
"Not that way," called Ogden after her, adding a benevolent postscript. "Here; come along down these stairs with me; I'll show you where it is."
She stumbled after him down the marble steps with a heavy-footed clatter that could hardly have been expected from her slightness, and with a timorous hold on the bronze of the hand-rail.
"There," indicated Ogden; "the sixth door along, on the right. 'Vesuvian Fire Insurance Co.' it says." And he himself continued an abstracted descent by the stairway.
His nearest way home lay through the court and out of the door that led into the asphalted alley. Just within the archway of this door two men stood. The one was Vibert and the other was a dark young fellow of twenty or more whom Ogden, by a brief glimmer of fancy, made to be Brainard's younger son. Vibert was in the act of receiving a roll of bills from him.
The youth had a pinched and slender aspect; there was a furtive tremulousness in his hands; his eyes were reddish and the pupils swam half hazily in a lucent humor.
"I didn't know, Mark, but what you'd gone back on me, too," Vibert was saying to him. "If you'd managed to get around a little sooner you'd have saved a certain party from the grand razoo." He smiled grimly. "It's pretty close sailing—thirty, forty, forty-five"—he ran over the bills, rolled them up, and thrust them into his pocket.
The boy looked at him with some doubt and with a shade of fear. He seemed to have been fascinated and then dominated by the bigness and the hardihood of the other.
"It's all right, Mark," Vibert presently went on with a dogged vagueness; "I'm his son, too. Why wouldn't he give me any show? Why wouldn't he let me have a chance to show him what I am? Why did he go and shut down on me at the very start?"
"You!" cried the boy. "What can you expect, after the way he's treated me—his own son? They're up there now, I dare say"—with a bitter glance towards the corner of the Underground—"but they can never make things right with me. If it hadn't been for Abbie—she's about the only one that's turned a hand for me."
"Haven't I done well by you, too?—don't forget that. Well, you don't—'sh! I say you don't. Let the executors settle, and give 'em plenty to settle, too; they'll get enough for doing it." Vibert glanced up at the Underground windows. "He can't live forever." He brought his eyes back to the boy. "You've got to live yourself, though, and so have I. You've got some rights, haven't you?"
The boy did not accept this cue; perhaps he had already followed it more than once. He studied Vibert with eyes that seemed to indicate a change of thought.
"Say, Russ," he hinted, deprecatingly, "you're going to be a little more patient with Mayme?"
Vibert scowled. "Come, now, Marcus, that's all right; only don't let's have any preaching. What I like is a cheerful house—and an orderly one. Less sniffling and better meals. I guess you won't deny that, for a housekeeper, your sister is a good deal of a fizzle. She doesn't have to wash her own dishes, does she? And that girl I got her does the scrubbing and takes up the ashes, doesn't she? And we always take our dinners out, don't we? Well, then! I don't see what else we can do but go out altogether."
He drubbed his foot impatiently on the pavement.
"Well, so long!" he said carelessly to his companion. "Better not take anything more this afternoon. Do I see you on the track to-morrow?"
Ogden, of course, heard next to nothing of this talk, and his own preoccupations left him no opportunity to scandalize over the relations between Vibert and the young woman of the corridors, even if his inclinations had run that way. But it need not be denied that so close a grouping of these various persons turned his thoughts in the direction of the Brainard household, and his feet later in the direction of the Brainard house. He had lately been cultivating a more sympathetic apprehension of Abbie Brainard's position; it seemed possible that an hour's talk would offer opportunity for the delicate insinuation of his friendly interest. He rehearsed a number of suitable phrases; they took felicitous advantage of remarks on her side—remarks which he himself constructed—and left her, as she thought them over, in no doubt of his feeling sense of her position and of his desire to make his sympathies known and operative. That all these pretty paces would have been gone through in the absence of the Valentines is by no means certain; but their presence excluded the least attempt to try them, and it was with lagging feet indeed that he made his late return home to Brower and "Monte Cristo."
Cornelia McNabb's campaign against the tenants of the Clifton proceeded apace. Such as pleased her fancy or promised advantage to her future she attacked one by one; she made quite a succession of engagements, dropping here and picking up there, until she reached the point where, for as many hours of the day as she chose, her time was occupied, and occupied to her taste. We have already seen her in the office of the Underground National, and we may now see her in the office of the Massachusetts Brass Company. She did good work within the limits she had set for herself; she was accurate and fairly rapid, and therefore was in considerable request.
"I'd a good deal rather work around like this," she expounded to Ogden, one day, "than put in all my time in one place. Lots more variety, to begin with, and lots more pay. 'Most every one gives me half as much as I could get in any single office; and then I can skip around and have more of a show. You can talk about your rolling stone; that's all bosh."
Cornelia was now doing a daily stint of an hour or so in the office of the Brass Company. This hour came in the middle of the forenoon, and the work was oftener performed under the severe eye of Mrs. Floyd than our young amanuensis could have wished. Mrs. Floyd's presence in the office had always been rather frequent, and her prejudice against female stenographers did not operate to make it any the less so. She bestowed considerable scrutiny on Cornelia, and Cornelia returned the interest in kind. She recognized in Mrs. Floyd one of the minor lights of "Society," and she became more deeply indebted to her for points in costume, speech, and behavior than either perhaps realized.
Mrs. Floyd was generally accompanied by Miss Wilde. This provided Cornelia with a double course of instruction: she learned what to do and what to avoid.
Miss Wilde was generally accompanied by her hand-bag, and that receptacle was capable of an endless yield of documents calculated to irritate and perplex her brother-in-law. Mrs. Floyd encouraged this. Who, indeed, should take an interest in the affairs of her own sister if not her own husband?
One morning Ann produced a memorandum that stunned him. As he studied it she stood above him like the spirit of Bankruptcy.
"For Heaven's sake, Walworth, tell me what it means. Am I a ruined woman, or what?"
Floyd glanced at the sum total; the figures mounted high. "Theyhavestruck you pretty hard, that's a fact."
It was a bill for special assessments levied on the possessions of Ann E. Wilde, in one of McDowell's subdivisions. Paving, so much; sewers and water-mains, so much; stone sidewalk, so much.
"And eighteen dollars and a half for a quarter of a lamp-post," wailed Ann. "Why, Walworth, I haven't got the money on hand for all this; I never anticipated such a thing."
"What's a quarter of a lamp-post good for?" asked her sister.
"I suppose the cost is levied on four property-owners," said her husband.
"And who's going to see by it when it's up?" asked the disconsolate investor. "Nobody ever goes past."
"Not this year, perhaps; but there'll be plenty next year. You've no idea how the town is spreading about. Why don't you step upstairs and see McDowell?"
"Who starts these things going?" asked Ann. "Who fixes the amounts?"
"I guess it's done sometimes on the petition of other owners about—according to the frontage."
"And who's the principal owner all about there?" demanded Ann. "Ain't it McDowell himself?"
"Well, I don't suppose he's sold off very much yet."
"And so he's taxing me to make his own property more valuable. I like that. I'm glad I went to him. And your young Ogden—I suppose I can thank him for this."
"Good gracious, Ann; McDowell is taxed, too. The town's growing, and all outlying property is subject to such things. And don't blame poor Ogden."
"What more can you expect, Ann, in such a half-baked place as this?" queried her sister.
"Go up and see McDowell," repeated Walworth. "He can tell you all about it—when it's payable, and how, and whether there's a rebate or anything." He passed the papers back to Ann with the definitive air that closes a matter. "Jessie didn't come with you, then?" he inquired, turning towards his wife.
"No, poor thing; she is away down this morning. Why, what do you think, Walworth? They've been asking her if she can't testify."
"Testify fiddlesticks! What could she say? They don't need her; they've got a clear enough case as it is."
"But think of her in court."
"Don't think of her in court. She may be a thousand miles away by the time the thing comes up. Has anything more been seen or heard of that interesting vocalist?"
"Nothing. He left the poor child all alone in that big place, with not three days' supplies and the—"
She looked sharply over towards Cornelia. The girl's hour was ended, but she had engaged in a pretence of tidying up the desk.
Ann creased her papers thoughtfully between her fingers. "I had no idea that curb-stones cost so much," she sighed. "If I had only sold out on that offer last month!"
Cornelia was now engaged in complicating her apron-strings. Her interest in the Underground people, while becoming no less professional, had become a good deal more personal. She would have given anything for a decent pretext to remain. It was hard indeed to tear herself away from this discussion of the affairs of Burton Brainard's sister.
"—and the gas turned off," Mrs. Floyd finished, as the door closed on the reluctant girl. "And that's the state Jessie found her in—everything just about as bad as it could be."
"Well, no," Floyd dissented, thoughtfully. "There's one important consolation—this suit could be brought."
"Oh, yes," answered his wife, quickly. "This Canadian woman doesn't claim to be his wife—only that she ought to be, and that he promised to make her so."
"Interesting family," murmured Walworth. "Should like to be related to 'em."
"She knew him in Toronto. She found him here before she had been in town a week."
"Small world," remarked Walworth, negligently. He played with his penholders.
Mrs. Floyd became silent. Gossip seemed out of the question with an indifferent husband and a preoccupied sister.
Vibert's detection by the girl he had betrayed and discarded, and his desertion of his young wife, were immediately followed by the proper steps on the part of Brainard's attorneys. The old man had received the intelligence of Vibert's double misdeed with a tremendous outburst of wrath and vituperation. His indignation revived in him all the crude violence of his youth; he drew out from the disused corners of his memory such a vocabulary and such turns of phrase as are possible only to one whose boyhood has been spent on the crass and barbaric frontier. He towered and swayed like a rank plant that has sprung rapidly from the earth and has brought up the slime and mould on its sheath and stalk. His prodigal and picturesque indecencies were heard but half understandingly by his son, and were lost, as to everything save their animus, on his advisers.
The equilibrium of the scales (whose mathematical poise he had once proven to his own satisfaction) was now destroyed; this outrage on his daughter and himself and all his belongings put another and a different face on the matter. The girl was received back into her father's house. It was the understanding that she was to remain there until the legal undoing of all this mischief had been accomplished, and that, afterwards, she must prepare herself for an indefinite exile among certain of her father's relatives still resident in Centralia.
During this interval Brainard allowed himself only the minimum of communication with his daughter; her mother's fluttering sympathies were too tenuous and too faded to furnish anything very definite or vivid in the way of consolation; her brother did not readily abandon himself to the softer feelings—particularly when work of so much sterner character was before them; and but for her sister this crushed and unfortunate child would have received but slender support and comfort. Abbie was not only sister, but mother and family circle too; she found a use for all the pent-up tenderness and domesticity of her nature.
The bill in the case of Vibertvs. Vibert was filed without receiving any undue attention from the press. Some exertions were taken, some influence was used, and the matter merely made a cold, official, numerical appearance in the legal columns of such of the dailies as affect complete court reports. The relations between Vibert and Jane Doane, however, made too good a "story" to be ignored in every quarter; some brief mention of it appeared in a new and struggling one-cent evening paper. The friends and well-wishers of the Brainards were surprised by the extent of that paper's circulation—a good many people appeared to have seen it.
The case of Vibertvs. Vibert had its place near the head of a short docket and was reached with much less than the usual delay. It was tried quietly and privately rather late one afternoon at a sitting which might have been termed either a prolongation of the regular session or a supplement to it. Perhaps only a legal mind could have distinguished; probably the legal mind that dominated the occasion did not attempt the distinction.