Two or three weeks after the new sign of “Tracy & Boyce” had been hung upon the outer walls of Thessaly it happened that the senior partner was out of town for the day, and that during his absence the junior partner received an important visit from Mr. Schuyler Tenney. Although this gentleman was not a client, his talk with Horace was so long and interesting that the young lawyer felt justified in denying himself to several callers who were clients.
Mr. Schuyler Tenney, who has a considerable part to play in this story, did not upon first observations reveal any special title to prominence. To the cursory glance, he looked like any other of ten hundred hundreds of young Americans who are engaged in making more money than they need. I speak of him as young because, though there was a thick sprinkling of gray in his closely cut hair, and his age in years must have been above rather than below forty, there was nothing in his face or dress or bearing to indicate that he felt himself to be a day older than his companion. He was a slender man, with a thin, serious face, cold gray eyes, and a trim drab mustache. Under his creaseless overcoat he wore neat gray clothes, of uniform pattern and strictly commercial aspect. He spoke with a quiet abruptness of speech as a rule, and both his rare smiles and his occasional simulations of vivacity were rather obviously artificial. Meeting Mr. Schuyler Tenney for even the first time, and looking him over, you would not, it is true, have been surprised to hear that he had just planted a dubious gold mine on the confiding English capitalists, or made a million dollars out of a three-jointed collar-button, or calmly cut out and carried off a railroad from under the very guns of the Stock Exchange. If his appearance did not suggest great exploits of this kind, it did not deny them once they were hinted by others. But the chance statement that he had privately helped somebody at his own cost without hope of reward would have given you a distinct shock.
At the present moment, Mr. Tenney was publicly known as one of the smartest and most “go-ahead” young business men of Thessaly. Dim rumors were upon the air that he was really something more than this; but as the commercial agencies had long ago given him their feeble “A 1” of superlative rating, and nothing definite was known about his outside investments, these reports only added vaguely to his respectability. He was the visible and actual head of the large wholesale hardware house of “S. Tenney & Co.”
This establishment had before the war borne another name on the big sign over its portals, that of “Sylvanus Boyce.” A year or two after the war closed a new legend—“Boyce & Co.”—was painted in. Thus it remained until the panic of 1873, when it underwent a transformation into “Boyce & Tenney.” And now for some years the name of Boyce had disappeared altogether, and the portly, redfaced, dignified General had dwindled more and more into a position somewhere between the head book-keeper and the shipping-clerks. He was still a member of the firm, however, and it was apparently about this fact that Mr. Tenney had come to talk.
He took a seat beside Horace’s desk, after shaking hands coldly with the young man, and said without ceremony:
“I haven’t had a chance before to see you alone. It wouldn’t do to talk over at the store—your father’s in and out all the while, more out than in, by the way—and Tracy’s been here every day since you joined him.”
“He’s out of town to-day,” remarked Horace.
“So I heard. That’s why I came over. Do you know that your father has overdrawn his income account by nearly eleven thousand dollars, and that the wrong side of his book hasn’t got room for more than another year or so of that sort of thing? In fact, it wouldn’t last that long if I wanted to be sharp with him.”
The words were spoken very calmly, but they took the color as by a flash from Horace’s face. He swung his chair round, and, looking Tenney in the eyes, seemed spell-bound by what he saw there. The gaze was sustained between the two men until it grew to be like the experiment of two school-children who try to stare each other down, and under its strain the young lawyer felt himself putting forth more and more exertion to hold his own.
“I thought I would tell you,” added the hardware merchant, settling himself back in the chair and crossing his thin legs, and seemingly finding it no effort to continue looking his companion out of countenance. “Yes, I thought you ought to know. I suppose he hasn’t said anything to you about it.”
“Not a word,” answered Horace, shifting his glance to the desk before him, and striving with all his might to get his wits under control.
“That’s like him. The last thing he ever wants to talk about is business, least of all his own. They tell a story about a man who used to say, ‘Thank God, that’s settled!’ whenever he got a note renewed. He must have been a relation of the General’s.”
“It’s Sheridan that that’s ascribed to,” said Horace, for the sake of saying something.
“What, ‘Little Phil’? I thought he had more sense.”
There was something in this display of ignorance which gave Horace the courage to face his visitor once more. He turned resolutely toward Tenney.
“Nobody knows better than you do,” he said, finding increased self-control with every word, now that the first excitement was over, “that a great deal of money has been made in that firm of yours. I shall be glad to investigate the conditions under which the business has contrived to make you rich and your partner poor.”
Mr. Tenney seemed disagreeably surprised at this tone. “Don’t talk nonsense,” he said with passing asperity. “Of course you’re welcome. The books are open to you. If a man makes four thousand dollars and spends seven thousand dollars, what on earth has his partner’s affairs to do with it? I live within my income and attend to my business, and he doesn’t do either. That’s the long and short of it.”
The two men talked together on this subject for a considerable time, Horace alternating between expressions of indignation at the fact that his father had become the unedifying tail of a concern of which he once was everything, and more or less ingenious efforts to discover what way out of the difficulty, if any, was offered. Mr. Tenney remained unmoved under both, and at last coolly quitted the topic altogether.
“You ought to do well here,” he said, ignoring a point-blank question about how General Boyce’s remaining interest could be protected. “Thessaly’s going to have a regular boom before long. You’ll see this place a city in another year or two. We’ve got population enough now, for that matter, only it’s spread out so. How did you come to go in with Tracy?”
“Why shouldn’t I? He’s the best man here, and starting alone is the slowest kind of slow work.”
Mr. Tenney smiled a little, and put the tips of his fingers together gently.
“Tracy and I don’t hitch very well, you know,” he said. “I took a downright fancy to him when I first came in from Sidon Hill, but he’s such a curious, touchy sort of fellow. I asked him one day what church he’d recommend me to join; of course I was a stranger, and explained to him that what I wanted was not to make any mistake, but to get into the church where there were the most respectable people who would be of use to me; and what do you think he said? He was huffed about it—actually mad! He said he’d rather have given me a hundred dollars than had me ask him that question; and after that he was cool, and so was I, and we’ve never had much to say to each other since then. Of course, there’s no quarrel, you know. Only it strikes me he’ll be a queer sort of man to get along with. A lawyer with cranks like that—why, you never know what he’ll do next.”
“He’s one of the best fellows alive,” said Horace, with sharp emphasis.
“Why, of course he is,” replied Mr. Tenney. “But that isn’t business. Take the General, for instance; he’s a good fellow, too—in a different kind of way, of course—and see where it’s landed him. The best fellow is No. 1. Look out for him and you are all right. Tracy might be making five or six times as much as he is, if he went the right way to work. He does more business and gets less for it than any other lawyer in town. There’s no sense in that.”
“Upon my word, Mr. Tenney,” said Horace, after a moment’s pause, in which he deliberately framed what he was going to say, “I find it difficult to understand why you thought it worth while to come here at all to-day: it surely wasn’t to talk about Tracy; and the things I want to know about my father you won’t discuss. Whatdoyou want, anyway? Wait a moment, let me finish. What I see is this: that you were a private in the regiment my father was colonel of; that he made you a sort of adjutant, or something in the nature of a clerk, and so lifted you out of the ranks; that during the war, when your health failed, he gave you a place in his business here at home, which lifted you out of the farm; that a while later he made you a partner; and that gradually the tables have been completely turned, until you are the colonel and he is the private, you are rich and he is nearly insolvent. That is what the thing sums up to in my mind. What isyourview of it? He was good to you. Have you come to tell me that now you are going to be good to him?”
“Good God! Haven’t I been good to him?” said Tenney, with real indignation. “Couldn’t I have frozen him out eighteen months ago instead of taking up his overdrafts at only ten per cent, charge so as to keep him along? There isn’t one man in a hundred who would have done for him what I have.”
“I am glad to hear it,” replied the young man.
“If the proportion was much larger, I am afraid this would be a very unhappy world to live in.”
Mr. Tenney eyed the lawyer doubtfully. He had not clearly grasped the meaning of this remark, but instinct told him that it was hostile.
“All right! You may take it that way, if you like.” He rose as he spoke and began buttoning his overcoat. “Only let me say this: when the smash comes, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. If you won’t listen to me, that’syourlookout.”
“But I haven’t done anything but listen to you for the last two hours,” said Horace, who longed to tell his visitor to go to the devil, and yet was betrayed into signs of anxiety at the prospect of his departure. “If you’ll remember, you haven’t told me anything that I asked for. Heaven knows, I should be only too glad to listen, if you’ve got anything to say.”
Mr. Tenney made a smiling movement with his thin lips and sat down again.
“I thought you would change your tune,” he said, calmly. Horace offered a gesture of dissent, to which the hardware merchant paid no attention. He had measured his man, and decided upon a system of treatment. “What I really wanted,” he continued, “was to look you over and hear you talk, and kind of walk around you and size you up, so to speak. You see I’ve only known you as a youngster—better at spending money than at making it. Now that you’ve started as a lawyer, I thought I’d take stock of you again, don’t you see; and the best way to sound you all around was to talk about your father’s affairs.”
Horace was conscious of a temptation to be angry at this cool statement, but he did not yield to it. “Then it isn’t true—what you have told me?” he asked.
“Well, yes, it is, mostly,” answered Mr. Tenney, again contemplating his joined finger-tips. “But it isn’t of so much importance compared with some other things. There’s bigger game afoot than partnerships in hardware stores.”
Horace gave a little laugh of mingled irritation and curiosity. “What the devilareyou driving at, Tenney?” he said, and swung his chair once more to face his visitor.
This time the two men eyed each other more sympathetically, and the tones of the two voices lost something of their previous reserve. Mr. Tenney himself resumed the conversation with an air of direct candor:
“I heard somebody say you rather counted on getting some of the Minster iron-works business.”
“Well, the fact is, I may have said I hoped to, but nothing definite has been settled. The ladies are friends of mine: we came up from New York together last month; but nothing was decided.”
“I see,” said Mr. Tenney, and Horace felt uneasily, as he looked into those sharp gray eyes, that no doubt they did see very clearly. “You were just gassing. I thought as much. There’s no harm in that, only it’s no good to gas with me, for there’s some solid business to be done—something mighty promising for both of us.”
“Of course I’ve no notion what you mean,” said Horace. “But it’s just as well to clear up the ground as we go along. The first experiment of yoking up Boyces and Tenneys together hasn’t turned out so admirably as to warrant me—What shall I say?”
“As to warrant you going in with your eyes shut.” Mr. Tenney supplied the lacking phrase with evident enjoyment. “Not at all, Mr. Boyce. On the contrary, what I want of you is to have your eyes peeled particularly wide open. But, first of all, Tracy mustn’t hear a breath of this whole thing.”
“Then go no further, I beg of you. I sha’n’t touch it.”
“Oh, yes, you will,” said Mr. Tenney, briskly and with confidence. “He has his own private business. Why shouldn’t you? The railroad work, for example: you don’t share in that. That is his own, and quite right, too. But that very fact leaves you free, doesn’t it, to go into speculations on your own account?”
“Speculations—yes, perhaps.”
“No ‘perhaps’ about it; of course it does. At least, you can hear what I have to say without telling him, whether you go into the thing or not; do you promise me that?”
“I don’t think I wish to promise anything,” said Horace, doubtingly.
“All right! If you won’t deal, you won’t; and I must protect myself my own way.” Mr. Tenney did not rise and again begin buttoning his coat, nor was it, indeed, necessary. There had been menace enough in his tone to effect his purpose.
“Very well, then,” answered Horace, in a low voice; “if you insist, I promise.”
“I shall know within half an hour if you do tell him,” said Mr. Tenney, in his most affable manner; “but of course you won’t.”
“Of course I won’t!” snapped Horace, testily.
“All right, then. So far, so good. The first thing, then, is to put the affairs of the Minster women into your hands.”
Horace took his feet off the table, and looked in fixed surprise at his father’s partner. “How—what do you mean?” he stammered at last, realizing, even as he spoke, that there were certain strange depths in Mr. Tenney’s eyes which had been dimly apparent at the outset, and then had been for a long time veiled, and were now once more discernible. “How do you mean?”
“It can be fixed, as easy as rolling off a log. Old Clarke has gone to Florida for his health, and there’s going to be a change made. A word from me can turn the whole thing over to you.”
“A word from you!” Horace spoke with incredulity, but he did not really doubt. There was a revelation of reserve power in the man’s glance that fascinated him.
“That’s what I said. The question is whether I shall speak it or not.”
“To be frank with you”—Horace smiled a little—“I hope very much that you will.”
“I daresay. But have you got the nerve for it?—that’s the point. Can you keep your mouth shut, and your head clear, and will you follow me without kicking or blabbing? That’s what I want to know.”
“And that’s just what I can’t tell you. I’m not going to bind myself to do unknown things.” Horace said this bravely enough, but the shrewd, listening ear understood very well the lurking accent of assent.
“You needn’t bind yourself to anything, except to tell Tracy nothing till I give you the word, and then only what we shall agree upon. Of course, later on he will have to know something about it. But leave that to me. And mind, mum’s the word.” Mr. Tenney rose now, not tentatively, but as one who is really going. Horace sprang to his feet as well, and despite the other’s declaration that he was pressed for time, and had already stayed too long, insisted on detaining him.
“What I don’t understand in all this,” he said, hurriedly—“for that matter the whole thing is a mystery—but what I particularly fail to see is your object in benefiting me. The two things don’t hitch. You tell me that you have got my father in a hole, and then you offer me a great and substantial prize. I don’t catch the sequence. You are not the man to do things for nothing. What you haven’t told me is what there is in this affair for you.”
Mr. Tenney seemed complimented by this tribute to his commercial sense and single-mindedness. “No, I haven’t told you,” he said, buttoning his coat. “That’ll come in due time. All you’ve got to do meanwhile is to keep still, and to take the thing when it comes to you. Let me know at once, and say nothing to any living soul—least of all Tracy—until you’ve talked with me. That oughtn’t to be hard.”
“And suppose I don’t like the conditions?”
“Then you may lump them,” said Schuyler Ten, ney, disclosing his small teeth again in a half-smile, as he made his way out.
Some two weeks later Mr. Horace Boyce, on returning home one evening, found on his table a note which had been delivered during the day by a servant. It was from Mrs. Minster—“Desideria Minster” she signed herself—asking him to call upon her the following afternoon. The young man read the missive over and over again by the lamplight, and if it had been a love-letter from the daughter instead of the polite business appointment by the mother, his eyes couldn’t have flashed more eagerly as he took in the meaning of its words.
The meaning of its words! He thought long upon that, ruminating in his easy-chair before the fire until far past midnight, until the dainty little Japanese saucer at his side was heaped up with cigar ashes, and the air was heavy with smoke.
Evidently this summons was directly connected with the remarks made by Tenney a fortnight before. He had said the Minster business should come to him, and here it was. The fact that Mrs. Minster wrote to him at his residence, rather than at his office, was proof that she too wished to have him alone, and not the firm of Tracy & Boyce, as her adviser. That there should be this prejudice against Reuben, momentarily disturbed the young man; but, upon examination, he found it easy to account for it. Reuben was very nice—his partner even paused for a moment to reflect how decent a fellow Reuben really was—but then, he scarcely belonged to the class of society in which people like the Boyces and Minsters moved. Naturally the millionnaire widow, belonging as she did to an ancient family in the Hudson River valley, and bearing the queer name of a grandmother who had been a colonial beauty, would prefer to have as her family lawyer somebody who also had ancestors.
The invitation had its notable social side, too. There was no good in blinking the fact that his father the General—who had effected a somewhat noisy entrance to the house a half-hour ago, and the sound of whose burdened breathing now intermittently came to his ears in the silence of the night—had allowed the family status to lapse. The Boyces were not what they had been. In the course of such few calls as he had made since his return, it had been impossible for him not to detect the existence of a certain surprise that he should have called at all. Everybody, too, had taken pains to avoid reference to his father, even when the course of talk made such allusion natural. This had for the moment angered the young man, and later had not a little discouraged him. As a boy he had felt it a great thing to be the son of a general, and to find it now to be a distinct detriment was disheartening indeed. But this black-bordered, perfumed note from Mrs. Minster put all, as by the sweep of a hand, into the background. Once he visited that proud household as a friend, once he looked Thessaly in the face as the confidential adviser of the Minster family, the Boyces were rehabilitated.
To dwell upon the thought was very pleasant, for it led the way by sweetly vagrant paths to dreams of the dark-eyed, beautiful Kate. During the past month these visions had lost color and form under the disconcerting influences just spoken of, but now they became, as if by magic, all rosy-hued and definite again. He had planned to himself on that first November day a career which should be crowned by marriage with the lovely daughter of the millions, and had made a mental march around the walls encompassing her to spy out their least defended point. Now, all at once, marvellous as it seemed, he found himself transported within the battlements. He was to be her mother’s lawyer—nay,herlawyer as well, and to his sanguine fancy this meant everything.
Everything? The word seemed feeble. It meant one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen as his wife—a lady well-born, delicately nurtured, clever, and good; it meant vast wealth, untold wealth, with which to be not only the principal personage of these provincial parts, but a great figure in New York or Washington or Europe. He might be senator in Congress, minister to Paris, or even aspire to the towering, solitary eminence of the Presidency itself with the backing of these millions. It meant a yacht, the very dream of sea-going luxury and speed, in which to bask under Hawaiian skies, to loiter lazily along the topaz shores of far Cathay, to flit to and fro between spice lands and cold northern seas, the whole watery globe subject to her keel. Why, there could be a castle on the Moselle, a country house in Devonshire, a flat in Paris, a villa at Mentone, a summer island home on the St. Lawrence, a mansion in New York—all together, if he liked, or as many as pleased his whim. It might be worth the while to lease a shooting in Scotland, only the mischief was that badly bred Americans, the odiousnouveaux riches, had rather discredited the national name in the Highlands.
So the young man’s fancies floated on the wreaths of scented smoke till at last he yawned in spite of himself, sated with the contemplation of the gifts the gods had brought him. He read Mrs. Minster’s note once again before he went to bed, and sleep overtook his brain while it was still pleasantly musing on the choicest methods of expending the income of her millions.
Curiously enough, during all these hours of happy castle-building, the question of why Schuyler Tenney had interested himself in the young man’s fortunes never once crossed that young man’s mind. To be frank, the pictures he painted were all of “gentlemen” and “ladies,” and his father’s partner, though his help might be of great assistance at the outset, could scarcely expect to mingle in such company, even in Horace’s tobacco reveries.
Neither to his father at the breakfast-table, nor to Reuben Tracy at the office, did young Mr. Boyce next day mention the fact that he was to call on Mrs. Minster. This enforced silence was not much to his liking, primarily because his temperament was the reverse of secretive. When he had done anything or thought of doing something, the impulse to tell about it was always strong upon him. The fact that the desire to talk was not rigorously balanced by regard for the exact and prosaic truth may not have been an essential part of the trait when we come to analysis, but garrulity and exaggeration ran together in Horace’s nature. To repress them now, just at the time when the most important event of his life impended, required a good deal of effort.
He had some qualms of conscience, too, so far as Reuben was concerned. Two or three things had happened within the past week which had laid him under special obligation to the courtesy and good feeling of his partner. They were not important, perhaps, but still the memory of them weighed uponhismind when, at three o’clock, he put on his coat and explained that he might not be back again that afternoon. Reuben nodded, and said, “All right: I shall be here. If so-and-so comes, I’ll go over the matter and make notes for you.” Then Horace longed very much to tell all about the Minster summons and the rest, and this longing arose as much from a wish to be frank and fair as from a craving to confide his secret to somebody; but he only hesitated for a second, and then went out.
Mrs. Minster received him in the chamber which had been her husband’s working room, and which still contained his desk, although it had since been furnished with book-shelves and was called the library. Horace noted, as the widow rose to greet him, that, though the desk was open, its pigeon-holes did not seem to contain many papers.
After his hostess had bidden him to be seated, and had spoken in mildly deprecating tones about the weather, she closed her resolutely lined lips, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at him in amiable suspense. As has been said before, Mrs. Minster’s dark face, with its high frame of white hair and its bright black eyes, habitually produced an impression of great cleverness and alert insight, and Horace was conscious of embarrassment in finding the task of conversation devolved upon himself. He took up the burden, however, and carried it along from subject to subject until at last it seemed fitting to broach the great topic.
“I didn’t get your note until evening,” he said, with a polite inquiring smile.
“No, I didn’t send it until after dinner,” she replied, and a pause ensued.
It fortunately occurred to Horace to say he was very glad to have her call upon him always, if in any way she saw how he could serve her. As he spoke these words, he felt that they were discreet and noncommittal, and yet must force her to come to the point. And they did, after a fashion.
“It is very kind of you, I’m sure,” she said, graciously, and came to a full stop.
“If there is anything I can do now,” Horace remarked tentatively.
“Well—oh yes! What I wanted to ask you was, do you know the Wendovers?”
“I don’t think I do.” murmured the young man, with a great sinking of the heart.
“They’re New York people,” the lady explained.
“I know almost nobody in New York,” answered Horace gloomily. “Wendover? No, I am quite sure the name is new to me.”
“That is curious,” said Mrs. Minster. She took a letter up from the desk. “This is from Judge Wendover, and it mentions you. I gathered from it that he knew you quite well.”
Oh, shades of the lies that might have been told, if one had only known!
Horace swiftly ransacked his brain for a way out of this dilemma. Evidently this letter bore upon his selection as her lawyer. He guessed rightly that it had been written at Tenney’s suggestion and by some one who had Mrs. Minster’s confidence. Obviously this some one was of the legal profession. That was his cue.
“The name does sound familiar, on second thought,” he said. “I daresay it is, if I could only place it. You see, I had a number of offers to enter legal firms in New York, and in that way I saw a good many people for a few minutes, you know, and quite probably I’ve forgotten some of their names. They would remember me, of course, but I might confuse them one with another, don’t you see? Strange, I don’t fix the man you mean. Was he a middle-aged man, grayish hair, well dressed?”
“Yes, that describes him.” She did not add that it would equally describe seven out of every ten other men called “judge” throughout the United States.
“Now I place him,” said Horace triumphantly. “There was some talk of my going into his office as a junior partner. Mutual friends of ours proposed it, I remember. But it didn’t attract me. Curious that I should have forgotten his name. One’s memory plays such whimsical tricks, though.”
“I didn’t know Judge Wendover was practising law,” said Mrs. Minster. “He never was much of a lawyer. He was county judge once down in Peekskill, about the time I was married, but he didn’t get reelected; and I thought he gave it all up when he went to New York.”
“If it’s the man I mean,” put in Horace, groping his way despairingly, “there wasn’t much business in his office. That is why I didn’t go in, I daresay: it wouldn’t be worth my while unless he himself was devoted to the law, and carried on a big practice.”
“I daresay it’s the same man,” remarked Mrs. Minster. “He probablywouldhave a kind of law office. They generally do.”
“Well, may I ask,” Horace ventured after another pause, “in what connection he mentions my name?”
“He recommends me to consult you about affairs—to—well, how shall I say it?—to make you my lawyer?”
Eureka! The words were out, and the difficult passage about Judge What’s-his-name was left safely behind. Horace felt his brain swimming on a sea of exaltation, but he kept his face immobile, and bowed his head with gravity.
“I am very young for so serious a responsibility, I’m afraid,” he said modestly.
The widow reassured him with a smile. “There isn’t really much to do,” she answered. “And somebody would have to learn what there is; and you can do that as well as any one else, better than a stranger. The difficulty is,” she spoke more slowly, and Horace listened with all his ears: “you have a partner, I’m told.”
The young man did not hesitate for an instant. “Only in a limited way,” he replied. “Mr. Tracy and I have combined on certain lines of work where two heads are better than one, but we each keep distinct our own private practice. It is much better.”
“I certainly prefer it,” said Mrs. Minster. “I am glad to hear you keep separate. I do not know Mr. Tracy, and, indeed, he is very highly spoken of as alawyer; but certain things I have heard—social matters, I mean—”
The lady broke off discreetly. She could not tell this young man what she had heard about that visit to the Lawton house. Horace listened to her without the remotest notion of her meaning, and so could only smile faintly and give the least suggestion of a sigh. Clearly he must throw Reuben overboard.
“We can’t have everything in this world just to our minds,” he said judicially, and it seemed to him to cover the case with prudent vagueness.
“I suppose you thought the partnership would be a good thing?” she asked.
“At the time—yes,” answered Horace. “And, to be fair, it really has some advantages. Mr. Tracy is a prodigious worker, for one thing, and he is very even-tempered and willing; so that the burden of details is taken off my shoulders to a great extent, and that disposes one to overlook a good many things, you know.”
Mrs. Minster nodded appreciation. She also knew what it was to delight in relief from the burden of details, and she said to herself that fortunately Mr. Boyce would thus have the more leisure to devote the affairs of the Minsters.
Into their further talk it is not needful to pursue the lady and her lawyer. She spoke only in general terms, outlining her interests and investments which required attention, and vaguely defining what she expected him to do. Horace listened very closely, but beyond a nebulous comprehension of the existence of a big company and a little company, which together controlled the iron-works and its appurtenances, he learned next to nothing. One of the first things which she desired of Horace was, however, that he should go to Florida and talk the whole subject over with Mr. Clarke, and to this he gladly assented.
“I will write to him that you are coming,” she said, as she rose. “I may tell you that he personally preferred Mr. Tracy as his successor; but, as I have told you—well, there were reasons why—”
Horace made haste to bow and say “quite so,” and thus spare Mrs. Minster the trouble of explanations. “Perhaps it will be better to say nothing to any one until I have returned from Florida,” he added, as a parting suggestion, and it had her assent.
The young man walked buoyantly down the gravel path and along the streets, his veins fairly tingling with excitement and joy. The great prize had come to him—wealth, honor, fame, were all within his grasp. He thought proudly, as he strode along, of what he would do after his marriage. Even the idea of hyphenating the two names in the English fashion, Minster-Boyce, came into his mind, and was made welcome. Perhaps, though, it couldn’t well be done until his father was dead; and that reminded him—he really must speak to the General about his loose behavior.
Thus Horace exultantly communed with his happy self, and formed resolutions, dreamed dreams, discussed radiant probabilities as he walked, until his abstracted eye was suddenly, insensibly arrested by the sight of a familiar sign across the street—“S. Tenney & Co.” Then for the first time he remembered his promise, and the air grew colder about him as he recalled it. He crossed the road after a moment’s hesitation, and entered the hardware store.
Mr. Tenney was alone in the little office partitioned off by wood and glass from the open store. He received the account given by Horace of his visit to the Minster mansion with no indication of surprise, and with no outward sign of satisfaction.
“So far, so good,” he said, briefly. Then, after a moment’s meditation, he looked up sharply in the face of the young man, who was still standing: “Did you say anything about your terms?”
“Of course not. How could I? You don’t show price-lists like a storekeeper, in thelaw!”
Mr. Tenney smiled just a little at Horace’s haughty tone—a smile of furtive amusement. “It’s just as well,” he said. “I’ll talk with you about that later. The old lady’s rather close-fisted. We may make a point there—by sending in bills much smaller than old Clarke’s used to be. I ought to have told you about that. Luckily it wasn’t needed.”
The matter-of-fact way in which Mr. Tenney used this “we” grated disagreeably on the young man’s ear, suggesting as it did a new partnership uncomfortably vague in form; but he deemed it wise not to touch upon the subject. His next question, as to the identity of Judge Wendover, brought upon the stage, however, still a third partner in the shadowy firm to which he had committed himself.
“Oh, Wendover’s in with us. He’s all right,” replied Schuyler Tenney, lightly. “Never heard of him, eh? He’s the president of the Thessaly Manufacturing Company. You’ll hear a good deal aboutthatlater on.” The speaker showed his teeth again by a smiling movement of the lips at this assurance, and Horace somehow felt his uneasiness growing.
“She wants me to go to Florida to see Clarke, and talk things over,” he said.
“Just so. That’s important. We must consider all that very carefully before you go. Clarke requires handling. Leave that to me. I’ll think out what you are to tell him.”
Horace was momentarily shrinking in importance before his own mental vision; and, though he resented it, he could not but submit. “I suppose I’d better make some other excuse to Tracy about the Florida trip,” he said, almost deferentially; “what do you think?”
“Oh, you think so, do you?” Mr. Tenney was interested, and made a renewed scrutiny of the young man’s face. “Perhaps. I’ll think about it, and let you know to-morrow. Look in about this time, and don’t say anything till then. So long!”
Thus dismissed, Horace took his leave, and it was not until he had nearly reached his home that the thoughts chasing each other in his mind began to take on once more roseate hues and hopeful outlines.
Mr. Tenney watched his partner’s son through the partition until he was out of sight, and then smiled at the papers on his desk in confidence. “He’s ready to lie at a minute’s notice,” he mused; “offered on his own hook to lie to Tracy. That’s all right—only he mustn’t try it on with me!”
The village of Thessaly took no pains to conceal the fact that it was very proud of itself. What is perhaps more unique is that the farming people round about, and even the smaller and rival hamlets scattered through the section, cordially recognized Thessaly’s right to be proud, and had a certain satisfaction in themselves sharing that pride.
Lest this should breed misconception and paint a more halcyon picture of these minor communities than is deserved, let it be explained that they were not without their vehement jealousies and bickerings among one another. Often there arose between them sore contentions over questions of tax equalization and over political neglects and intrigues; and here, too, there existed, in generous measure, those queer parochial prejudices—based upon no question whatever, and defying alike inquiry and explanation—which are so curious a heritage from the childhood days of the race. No long-toed brachycephalous cave-dweller of the stone age could have disliked the stranger who hibernated in the holes on the other side of the river more heartily than the people of Octavius disliked those of Sidon. In the hop-picking season the young men of these two townships always fell to fighting when they met, and their pitched conflicts in and around the Half-way House near Tyre, when dances were given there in the winter, were things to talk about straight through until hoeing had begun in the spring. There were many other of these odd and inexplicable aversions—as, for instance, that which had for many years impelled every farmer along the whole length of the Nedahma Creek road to vote against any and all candidates nominated from Juno Mills, a place which they scarcely knew and had no earthly reason for disliking. But in such cases no one asked for reasons. Matters simply stood that way, and there was nothing more to be said.
But everybody was proud of Thessaly. Neighbors took almost as much pleasure in boasting of its wealth and activity, and prophesying its future greatness, as did its own sons. The farmers when they came in gazed with gratified amazement at the new warehouses, the new chimneys, the new factory walls that were rising everywhere about them, and returned more satisfied than ever that “Thessaly was just a-humming along.” Dearborn County had always heretofore been a strictly agricultural district, full of rich farm-lands and well-to-do farm-owners, and celebrated in the markets of New York for the excellence of its dairy products. Now it seemed certain that Thessaly would soon be a city, and it was already a subject for congratulation that the industries which were rooting, sprouting, or bearing fruit there had given Dearborn County a place among the dozen foremost manufacturing shires in the State.
The farmers were as pleased over this as any one else. It was true that they were growing poorer year by year; that their lands were gradually becoming covered with a parchment film of mortgages, more deadly than sorrel or the dreaded black-moss; that the prices of produce had gone down on the one hand as much as the cost of living and of labor had risen on the other; that a rich farmer had become a rarity in a district which once was controlled by the princes of herds and waving fields: but all the same the agriculturists of Dearborn County were proud of Thessaly, of its crowds of foreign-born operatives, its smoke-capped chimneys, and its noisy bustle. They marched almost solidly to the polls to vote for the laws which were supposed to protect its industries, and they consoled themselves for falling incomes and increased expenditure by roseate pictures of the great “home market” which Thessaly was to create for them when it became a city.
The village had once been very slow indeed. For many years it had been scarcely known to the outside world save as the seat of a seminary of something more than local repute. This institution still nestled under the brow of the hill whence the boy Reuben Tracy had looked with fondly wistful vision down upon it, but it was no longer of much importance. It was yet possible to discern in the quiet streets immediately adjoining the seminary enclosure, with their tall arched canopies of elm-boughs, and old-fashioned white houses with verandas and antique gardens, some remains of the academic character that this institution had formerly imparted to the whole village. But the centre of activity and of population had long since moved southward, and around this had grown up a new Thessaly, which needed neither elms nor gardens, which had use for its children at the loom or the lathe when the rudiments of the common school were finished, and which alike in its hours of toil and of leisure was anything rather than academie.
I suppose that in this modern Thessaly, with its factories and mills, its semi-foreign saloons, and its long streets of uniformly ugly cottage dwellings, there were many hundreds of adults who had no idea whether the once-famous Thessaly seminary was still open or not.
If Thessaly had had the time and inclination for a serious study of itself, this decadence of the object of its former pride might have awakened some regret. The seminary, which had been one of the first in the land to open its doors to both sexes, had borne an honorable part in the great agitation against slavery that preceded the war. Some of its professors had been distinguished abolitionists—of the kind who strove, suffered, and made sacrifices when the cause was still unpopular, yet somehow fell or were edged out of public view once the cause had triumphed and there were rewards to be distributed, and they had taken the sentiment of the village with them in those old days. Then there was a steady demand upon the seminary library, which was open to householders of the village, for good books. Then there was maintained each winter a lecture course, which was able, not so much by money as by the weight and character of its habitual patrons, to enrich its annual lists with such names as Emerson, Burritt, Phillips, Curtis, and Beecher. At this time had occurred the most sensational episode in the history of the village—when the rumor spread that a runaway negro was secreted somewhere about the seminary buildings, and a pro-slavery crowd came over from Tyre to have him out and to vindicate upon the persons of his protectors the outraged majesty of the Fugitive Slave law, and the citizens of Thessaly rose and chased back the invaders with celerity and emphasis.
But all this had happened so long ago that it was only vaguely remembered now. There were those who still liked to recall those days and to tell stories about them, but they had only themselves for listeners. The new Thessaly was not precisely intolerant of the history of this ante-bellum period, but it had fresher and more important matters to think of; and its customary comment upon these legends of the slow, one-horse past was, “Things have changed a good deal since then,” offered with a smile of distinct satisfaction.
Yes, things had changed. Stephen Minster’s enterprise in opening up the iron fields out at Juno, and in building the big smelting-works on the outskirts of Thessaly, had altered everything. The branch road to the coal district which he called into existence lifted the village at once into prominence as a manufacturing site. Other factories were erected for the making of buttons, shoes, Scotch-caps, pasteboard boxes, matches, and a number of varieties of cotton cloths. When this last industry appeared in the midst of them, the people of Thessaly found their heads fairly turned. To be lords of iron and cotton both!
This period of industrial progress, of which I speak with, I hope, becoming respect and pride, had now lasted some dozen years, and, so far from showing signs of interruption, there were under discussion four or five new projects for additional trades to be started in the village, which would be decided upon by the time the snow was off the ground. During these years, Thessaly had more than quadrupled its population, which was now supposed to approximate thirteen thousand, and might be even more. There had been considerable talk for the past year or two about getting a charter as a city from the legislature, and undoubtedly this would soon be done. About this step there were, however, certain difficulties, more clearly felt than expressed. Not even those who were most exultant over Thessaly’s splendid advance in wealth and activity were blind to sundry facts written on the other side of the ledger.
Thessaly had now some two thousand voters, of whom perhaps two-fifths had been born in Europe. It had a saloon for every three hundred and fifty inhabitants, and there was an uneasy sense of connection between these two facts which gave rise to awkward thoughts. The village was fairly well managed by its trustees; the electorate insisted upon nothing save that they should grant licenses liberally, and, this apart, their government did not leave much to be desired. But how would it be when the municipal honors were taken on, when mayor, aider-men and all the other officers of the new city, with enlarged powers of expenditure and legislation, should be voted for? Whenever the responsible business men of Thessaly allowed their minds to dwell upon a forecast of what this board of aldermen would probably be like, they frankly owned to themselves that the prospect was not inviting. But as a rule they did not say so, and the village was drifting citywards on a flowing tide.
It was just before Christmas that Reuben Tracy took the first step toward realizing his dream of making this Thessaly a better place than it was. Fourteen citizens, all more or less intimate friends of his, assembled at his office one evening, and devoted some hours to listening to and discussing his plans.
An embarrassment arose almost at the outset through the discovery that five or six of the men present thought Thessaly was getting on very well as it was, and had assumed that the meeting was called for the purpose of arranging a citizens’ movement to run the coming spring elections for trustees in the interest of good government—by which they of course understood that they were to be asked to take office. The exposure of this mistake threatened for a little time to wreck the purpose of the gathering. Mr. Jones, a gentleman who made matches, or rather had just taken a handsome sum from the great Ruby Loco-foco Trust as his reward for ceasing to manufacture them, was especially disposed to resent what Reuben said about the moral and material state of the village. He insisted that it was the busiest and most progressive town in that whole section of the State; it had six streets well paved, was lighted with gas, had no disorderly houses to speak of, and turned out an annual production of manufactures worth two and a half times as much as the industrial output of any other place of its size in the State. He had the figures at his tongue’s end, and when he finished with a spirited sentence about being proud of his native town, and about birds fouling their own nests, it looked as if he had the sense of the little assemblage with him.
Reuben Tracy found it somewhat difficult to reply to an unexpected attack of this nature. He was forced to admit the truth of everything his critic had said, and then to attempt once more to show why these things were not enough. Father Chance, the Catholic priest, a broad-shouldered, athletic young man, who preached very commonplace sermons but did an enormous amount of pastoral work, took up the speaking, and showed that his mind ran mainly upon the importance of promoting total abstinence. John Fairchild, the editor and owner of Thessaly’s solitary daily paper, a candid and warmhearted man, whose heterodoxy on the tariff question gave concern to the business men of the place, but whose journal was honest and popular, next explained what his views were, and succeeded in precipitating, by some chance remark, a long, rambling, and irrelevant debate on the merits of protection and the proper relations between capital and labor. To illustrate his position on these subjects, and on the general question of Thessaly’s condition, Mr. Burdick, the cashier of the Dearborn County Bank, next related how he was originally opposed to the Bland Silver bill, and detailed the mental processes by which his opinion had finally become reversed. The Rev. Dr. Turner, the rector of St. Matthew’s, a mildly paternal gentleman, who seemed chiefly occupied by the thought that he was in the same room with a Catholic priest, tentatively suggested a bazaar, with ladies and the wives of workingmen mingled together on the committee, and smiled and coughed confusedly when this idea was received in absolute silence.
It was Dr. Lester, a young physician who had moved into the village only a few years before, but was already its leading medical authority, who broke this silence by saying, with a glance which, slowly circling the room, finally rested on Reuben Tracy: “All this does not help us. Our views on all sorts of matters are interesting, no doubt, but they are not vital just now. The question is not so much why you propose something, but what do you propose?”
The answer came before the person addressed had arranged his words, and it came from Horace Boyce. This young gentleman had, with a self-restraint which he himself was most surprised at, taken no part in the previous conversation.
“I think this is the idea,” he said now, pulling his chair forward into the edge of the open space under the light, and speaking with easy distinctness and fluency. “It will be time enough to determine just what we will do when we have put ourselves in the position to act together upon what we may decide to do. We are all proud and fond of our village; we are at one in our desire to serve and advance its interests. That is a platform broad enough, and yet specific enough, for us to start upon. Let us accept it as a beginning, and form an association, club, society—whatever it may be called—with this primary purpose in view: to get together in one body the gentlemen who represent what is most enlightened, most public-spirited, and at once most progressive and most conservative in Thessaly. All that we need at first is the skeleton of an organization, the most important feature of which would be the committee on membership. Much depends upon getting the right kind of men interested in the matter. Let the objects and work of this organization unfold and develop naturally and by degrees. It may take the form of a mechanics’ institute, a library, a gymnasium, a system of coffee-taverns, a lecture course With elevating popular exhibitions; and so I might go on, enumerating all the admirable things which similar bodies have inaugurated in other villages, both here and in Europe. I have made these matters, both at home and abroad, a subject of considerable observation; I am enthusiastic over the idea of setting some such machinery in motion here, and I am perfectly confident, once it is started, that the leading men of Thessaly will know how to make it produce results second to none in the whole worldwide field of philanthropic endeavor.”
When young Mr. Boyce had finished, there was a moment’s hush. Then Reuben Tracy began to say that this expressed what he had in mind; but, before he had the words out, the match manufacturer exclaimed:
“Whatever kind of organization we have, it will need a president, and I move that Mr. Horace Boyce be elected to that place.”
Two or three people in the shadows behind clapped their hands. Horace protested that it was premature, irregular, that he was too young, etc.; but the match-maker was persistent, and on a vote there was no opposition. The Rev. Dr. Turner ceased smiling for a moment or two while this was going on, and twirled his thumbs nervously; but nobody paid any attention to him, and soon his face lightened again as his name was placed just before that of Father Chance on the general committee.
Once started, the work of organization went forward briskly. It was decided at first to call the organization the “Thessaly Reform Club,” but two manufacturers suggested that this was only one remove from styling it a Cobden Club outright, and so the name was altered to “Thessaly Citizens’ Club,” and all professed themselves pleased. When the question of a treasurer came up, Reuben Tracy’s name was mentioned, but some one asked if it would look just the thing to have the two principal officers in one firm, and so the match-maker consented to take the office instead. Even the committee on by-laws would have been made up without Reuben had not Horace interfered; then, upon John Fairchild’s motion, he was made the chairman of that committee, while Fairchild himself was appointed secretary.
When the meeting had broken up, and the men were putting on their overcoats and lighting fresh cigars, Dr. Lester took the opportunity of saying in an undertone to Reuben; “Well, what do you think of it?”
“It seems to have taken shape very nicely. Don’t you think so?”
“Hm-m! There’s a good deal of Boyce in it so far, and damned little Tracy!”
Reuben laughed. “Oh, don’t be disturbed about that. He’s the best man for the place. He’s studied all these things in Europe—the cooperative institutes in the English industrial towns, and so on; and he’ll put his whole soul into making this a success.”
The doctor sniffed audibly at this, but offered no further remark. Later on, however, when he was walking along in the crisp moonlight with John Fairchild, he unburdened his mind.
“It was positively sickening,” he growled, biting his cigar angrily, “to see the way that young cub of a Boyce foisted himself upon the concern. I’d bet any money he put up the whole thing with Jones. They nominated each other for president and treasurer—didn’t you notice that?”
“Yes, I noticed it,” replied Fairchild, with something between a sigh and a groan. After a moment he added: “Do you know, I’m afraid Rube will find himself in a hole with that young man, before he gets through with him. It may sound funny to you, but I’m deucedly nervous about it. I’d rather see a hundred Boyces broiled alive than have harm come to so much as Tracy’s little finger.”
“What could have ailed him to go in blindfold like that into the partnership? He knew absolutely nothing of the fellow.”
“I’ve told him a hundred times, he’s got no more notion of reading characters than a mulley cow. Anybody can go up to him and wheedle his coat off his back, if he knows the first rudiments of the confidence game. It seems, in this special instance, that he took a fancy to Boyce because he saw him give two turkeys to old Ben Lawton, who’d lost his money at a turkey-shoot and got no birds. He thought it was generous and noble and all that. So far as I can make out, that was his only reason.”
Dr. Lester stopped short and looked at his companion. Then he burst out in a loud, shrill laugh, which renewed itself in intermittent gurgles of merriment so many times that Fairchild finally found them monotonous, and interposed a question:
“There’s something besides fun in all this, Lester. What is it?”
“It isn’t professional to tell, my dear fellow, but thereissomething—you’re right—and we are Reuben’s friends against all the world; and this is what I laughed at.”
Then in a low tone, as if even the white flaring moon and the jewelled stars in the cold sky had ears, he told his secret to his friend—a secret involving one small human being of whose very existence Mr. Horace Boyce had no knowledge.
“The girl has come back here to Thessaly, you know,” concluded the doctor.
Fairchild nodded assent. Then after a moment’s thought he said:
“It’s too bad we changed the name of the organization. That cussoughtto be the president of a Reform Club!”