CHAPTER XIA PEACE CONFERENCE
“I don’t know why we were all so carried away by it,” said Caine, reflectively. “I’ve been thinking it over. There was much more bathos than pathos; and a delightful absence of both elegance and eloquence about his speech. Yet for a moment I was almost tempted to join in your charmingly ill-timed applause. The whole thing savored of cheap melodrama. But—”
“It was the man himself. Not what he said,” answered Jack Hawarden, eager in defense of his new-built idol. “He stood there facing a crowd that would have liked nothing better than to annihilate him. That drunken Thing on the floor was enough by itself to ruin him forever at the Arareek. Yet Conover made us listen and he swayed us to suit himself. Not by what he said, but by his own big strength, I think. There’s something about him I don’t understand. But he’s aman. And, after to-night,—whatever the others say—I take my hat off to him.”
“For the perfecting of a young author’s style,” observed Caine, irrelevantly, “what sample of nervousEnglish can be finer than Carlyle’s ‘Heroes and Hero Worship?’”
His raillery jarred on the boy’s enthusiasm and checked the gush of extravagant praise. Letty Standish, with whom the two were walking home from the Club, took advantage of Jack’s snubbed silence, to put in a word.
“I think Mr. Hawarden is right, Amzi,” she ventured. “There’s something about Mr. Conover that one can’t very well define. I think he could make one do anything he chose. I knowIwas almost—afraid of him,—before I’d known him ten minutes. I don’t quite think I like him. He’s so powerful, so rough, so domineering. Not like anyone I ever met before. But,” with a slight shudder, “I believe I’d do whatever he ordered me to. Especially if he scowled at me in that bullying way, with his eyes half-shut. Isn’t it funny to feel like that about a person you hardly know?”
She ended with a nervous laugh, and looked up at Caine with a pretty, helpless air of seeking protection. Amzi always found this appealing attitude irresistible. If social longings were Conover’s “feet of clay,” Letty Standish served as a similar pedal handicap for Caine. He wished young Hawarden had not thrust himself upon the tête-à-tête of their homeward walk. He wanted, loverlike, to reassure Letty with unspeakably doughty promises of safeguard from peril; to see her soft round eyes raised to his in the admiration such protestations are wont to excite between very youngor very old lovers. But Jack was doggedly treading along beside them in all the charming ignorance of his age and temperament. The boy’s sulks were even now dissolving and he joined again in the talk; still harping on his hero.
“I never met Conover till this morning,” said he. “I wish now I’d known him better. It’s queer I never met him at Miss Shevlin’s. She’s his ward, you know.”
Letty, to whom he spoke, answered with a tinge of the latent sub-acid in her gentle voice:
“I didn’t know. But I’ve noticed things about Miss Shevlin that made it seem quite likely.”
“Miss Shevlin,” said the boy, hotly, “is the prettiest, brightest, best-bred girl I ever knew. If you mean she is—”
“I dare say,” answered Letty with elaborate carelessness. “But I never noticed her especially.”
“I don’t see,” persisted Jack, “how you could have helped it. She’s the sort of girl everyone notices. There’s something about her—”
“Why, what a zealous champion she has!” exclaimed Letty, playfully, her laughter ringing thin. “I congratulate her.”
“You needn’t,” retorted Jack. “And I’m afraid you’ll never even have a chance to congratulateme. I—”
“By the way, Hawarden,” interposed Caine, lazily pouring oil on the churned waters, according to his wont. “I read yourScribner’sstory to-day. I cancongratulate you onthat, at any rate, can’t I? It was decidedly good. I wondered at your knowledge of human nature.”
Hawarden’s chest swelled. At twenty-two, who does not know human nature as never can it be known in later years? And who does not rejoice at recognition of that vast knowledge?
“I’ve had some experience with life, in my time,” said Jack, darkly. “And I paint my fellow-man as I see him. Not as he ought to be. But as he is. If I seem merciless in my character drawing—”
“You do indeed!” began Caine. But a fit of very well executed coughing cut short his righteous praise. Jack, disappointed, sought to lead the talk back to the former happy theme.
“I’m writing a story now,” he said, “that is bigger in every way than anything I’ve done before. But I can’t decide yet, even in my own mind, whether it is very good or very bad. It is one or the other. I know that.”
“If it’s enough of either,” replied Caine, “it is certain to make a popular hit.”
“I’ve made De—Miss Shevlin my heroine,” pursued Hawarden, scornfully disregarding Caine’s untimely flippancy. “But it’s hard to put a girl like her on paper the way one sees her in one’s mind. I wrote a poem about her once.Harper’s Magazineaccepted it.”
He paused. Then, ridden by the demon of truth, added with reluctance, “They published it in fine printover toward the end. But,” more buoyantly, “I saw it copied afterward in no less than two papers.”
“Why don’t you put Mr. Conover into a story, too?” suggested Letty, unwilling not to seem quite at home in so profound a literary discussion. “Wouldn’t he make a good character? He’s so—”
“I’m afraid not,” decided the boy, judicially weighing his verdict. “He’s more of amanthan anyone else in all my experience. But he wouldn’t quite fit into a story, I’m afraid. You see, he lacks romance, for one thing. One could hardly fancy Caleb Conover in love. And then—unless you count this evening’s affair—I doubt if he was ever in an adventure of any sort in his life. His character, from a literary viewpoint, doesn’t lend itself to action or analysis. In making the study of human nature my hobby, I have—”
“I see!” broke in Letty, almost sharply. “You are quite right. He would be impossible in a story—as he is in real life!”
“I hardly think so,” demurred Caine. “Not impossible. Improbable, at worst. I am afraid a great many people in Granite will find that out before he is through.”
They had reached the Standish home. Hawarden bade them goodnight at the door; declining Letty’s perfunctory invitation to come in. The evening was still young. But the lack of cordiality in Letty’s voice grated on his armor of youth. He reflected somewhat belatedly that she and Caine were engaged andthat it was possible they might find themes even more alluring than literature to talk over, together. So, unwilling, he left them.
Caine and Letty strolled slowly up the walk. The night was cool, for June. So, ignoring the lounging chairs on the veranda, they passed into the house.
“This is one of the last evenings we can sit indoors,” commented Letty. “It’s hard to realize that summer is so near. I suppose this week will wind up the season. Everywhere else except in old-fashioned Granite, it must have ended weeks ago.”
“Yes. We’re old-fashioned here in Granite,” said Caine, seating himself on the arm of the chair into which she had thrown herself. “I think somebody once left an 1860 calendar in this town, and we’ve all been living by it ever since. We’re like the scaly, finny Oldest Inhabitants in the poem, who dreamed away their lives in the coral grove, while a seven stanza storm roared across the ocean overhead. When the storm of progress cuts a little below the surface we Granite folk blink upward from our dreams in pained disapproval. I think that’s why we look askance at Conover. He represents—”
“Oh, am I to have that dreadful creature’s name forever dinned into my ears?” complained Letty. “Isn’t it enough that Father makes us ask him here to dinner, Friday; withoutyourtalking forever about him in the little while people leave us alone together? In another minute Aunt Lydia will be pottering in to play propriety. And then—”
“And then, ‘Fly from the Aunt, thou sluggard!’ shall be my motto,” finished Caine. “I wish her virtues didn’t oppress me so. I wouldn’t object to her so much, if someone whose vocabulary was as limited as his knowledge of heaven’spersonnel, hadn’t once described her looks as ‘Saintly.’ She has been trying so hard to live up to the picture, ever since, that it’s a bit wearing on poor sinners like me.”
“It’s wicked to be so sacrilegious,” returned Letty, primly. “And I don’t like to have you speak so of my family. After all, she is my aunt.”
“Don’t think for a moment I’m blamingyoufor that, sweetheart,” he protested with an earnestness that left Letty as usual in doubt whether or not he had perpetrated some witticism she ought to have seen. Taking hasty mental review of their talk, she decided he had not, and went on:
“And her faceissaintly. You know she—”
“Perhaps it is,” he acquiesced. “But what a pity Fra Angelico and Rafael couldn’t have seen her! Then we should have had all those cherubs and red-and-gold angels of theirs depicted with thin gray hair parted in the middle, and with gray switches and half-inch eye-glasses.”
“You have grown coarse from associating with that Conover man,” pouted Letty. “It’s—it’s indelicate to speak of switches. And it hurts my feelings cruelly to have you abuse the people I love!”
The tears, always comfortably near the surface, trembled in Letty’s voice and eyes. Caine, in a feverof remorse, begged forgiveness and tried to put his arm about her. But she drew away with a little hunch of the shoulders.
“You’ve spoiled my evening!” she wailed. “First you introduced that miserable man to me and made him frighten me, and now you make fun of—”
Footsteps crossing the hall brought her tale of wrong to an abrupt halt. She sat up and furtively mopped her eyes. Tears were so common and so easy a relief to her that normally they left scant mark of their presence. Caine rose and faced the door; the distressed lover merging as by magic into the bored, suave man of the world.
Reuben Standish’s widowed sister-in-law glided into the room, diffusing an aura of mild beneficence that struck Caine’s nerves to the raw. Her near-sighted eyes turned as in lofty benediction upon the lovers; her thick glasses diffusing and magnifying the glance until it seemed to embrace all the visible world.
Mrs. Standish, on the death of her husband, had come to keep house for her widower brother-in-law. She had brought with her her orphaned grandnephew, Clive, (only son of Letty’s elder brother, long dead), whose upbringing was at once her chief visible claim to sanctity and her scriptural thorn in the flesh.
“Clive has been so bad again this evening!” she said with a sigh, after a distant greeting to Caine, “I suppose these crosses are sent to us. But sometimes I am nearly tempted to wonder why. I actuallycaught him tacking his grandfather’s slippers to the floor, where I had left them, in front of the chiffonier, in Mr. Standish’s room. I locked him in the nursery for an hour while I prayed to see my duty clear. And when I went to him, strengthened and inspired to make him see his fault, what do you think I found him doing? The hardened boy was actually drawing caricature, depicting his grandfather trying to walk in the tacked-down slippers. He had not even the grace to hide it when he saw me coming. There was nothing left for me to do but to whip him. So I have sent him out to cut a small stick.”
“Poor little chap!” muttered Caine, stifling a smile. He was fond of the boy, who in turn idolized him.
“Perhaps,” went on Amzi, aloud, “If, instead of whipping him, you could let me talk to him and explain—”
“Aunt Lydia!” piped a voice from the doorway. A little Eton-suited boy with a mop of yellow hair and sorrowful dark eyes, hesitated on the threshold.
“Oh,hereyou are,” added the child, coming into the room and walking straight up to Mrs. Standish. “I—”
“Where is the stick?” asked Nemesis, her glasses reflecting less sanctity than was their custom, as they sought a glimpse of the hands Clive held clasped behind him.
“I’m sorry,” replied the boy, apologetically. “It was so dark I couldn’t find a stick. But,” with apropitiatory smile, as he brought his hands forward, “Here are two stones you can throw at me, instead, if you like.”
Caine’s laughter exploded; breaking in with scandalous intrusion, upon the penitential scene.
“Mr. Caine,” said Mrs. Standish, her coldly righteous rebuke rising above Letty’s milder reproval, “I think, perhaps, for discipline’s sake, it might be well for you to end your call before you do anything more to make this wicked boy regard his fault as a matter for levity.”
Caine glanced in humorous appeal toward Letty. But his fiancée, as usual in matters of family crisis, only stared back in piteous fear.
“Mr. Caine,” called Clive, as the visitor completed somewhat frigid adieux and moved toward the door, “I amverysorry I got you into trouble. I’m afraid Aunt Lydia don’tquiteunderstand us men.”