Mr. Schuyler Tenney had never before been afforded an opportunity of studying a young gentleman of fashion and culture in the intimacy of his private apartments, and he looked about Horace’s room with lively curiosity and interest, when the two conspirators had entered the General’s house, gone up-stairs, and shut doors behind them.
“It looks like a ninety-nine-cent store, for all the world,” was his comment when he had examined the bric-à-brac on the walls and mantels, “hefted” a bronze trifle or two on the table, and taken a comprehensive survey of the furniture and hangings.
“It’s rather bare than otherwise,” said Horace, carelessly. “I got a tolerably decent lot of traps together when I had rooms in Jermyn Street, but I had to let most of them go when I pulled up stakes to come home.”
“German Street? I suppose that is in Germany?”
“No—London.”
“Oh! Sold ’em because you got hard up?”
“Not at all. But this damned tariff of yours—or ours—makes it cost too much to bring decent things over here.”
“Protection to American industry, my boy,” said Mr. Tenney, affably. “We couldn’t get on a fortnight without it. Just think what—”
“Oh, hang it all, man! We didn’t come here to talk tariff!” Horace broke in, with a smile which was half annoyance.
“No, that’s so,” assented Mr. Tenney, settling himself in the low, deep-backed easy-chair, and putting the tips of his lean fingers together. “No, we didn’t, for a fact.” He added, after a moment’s pause: “I guess I’ll have to rig up a room like this myself, when the thing comes off.” He smiled icily to himself at the thought.
“Meanwhile, let us talk about the ‘thing,’ as you call it. Will you have a drink?”
“Never touch it,” said Mr. Tenney, and he looked curiously on while Horace poured out some brandy, and then opened a bottle of soda-water to go with it. He was particularly impressed by the little wire frame-work stand made to hold the round-bottomed bottle, and asked its cost, and wondered if they wouldn’t be a good thing to keep in the store.
“Now to business!” said Horace, dragging out from under a sofa the black tin box which held the Minster papers, and throwing back its cover. “I’ve told you pretty well what there is in here.”
Mr. Tenney took from his pocket-book the tabular statement Horace had made of the Minster property, and smoothed it out over his pointed knee.
“It’s a very pretty table,” he said; “no bookkeeper could have done it better. I know it by heart, but we’ll keep it here in sight while you proceed.”
“There’s nothing for me to proceed with,” said Horace, lolling back in his chair in turn. “I want to hearyou!Don’t let us waste time. Broadly, what do you propose?”
“Broadly, what does everybody propose? To get for himself what somebody else has got. That’s human nature. It’s every kind of nature, down to the little chickens just hatched who start to chase the chap with the worm in his mouth before they’ve fairly got their tails out of the shell.”
“You ought to write a book, Schuyler,” said Horace, using this familiar name for the first time: “‘Tenney on Dynamic Sociology’! But I interrupted your application. What particular worm have you got in your bill’s eye?”
“We are all worms, so the Bible says. I suppose even those scrumptious ladies there come under that head, like we ordinary mortals.” Mr. Tenney pointed his agreeable metaphor by touching the paper on his knee with his joined finger-tips, and showed his small, sharpened teeth in a momentary smile.
“I follow you,” said Horace, tentatively. “Go on!”
“That’s a heap of money that you’ve ciphered out there, on that paper.”
“Yes. True, it isn’t ours, and we’ve got nothing to do with it. But that’s a detail. Go on!”
“A good deal of it can be ours, if you’ve got the pluck to go in with me.”
Horace frowned. “Upon my word, Tenney,” he said, impatiently, “what do you mean?”
“Jest what I said,” was the sententious and collected response.
The younger man laughed with an uneasy assumption of scorn. “Is it a burglary you do me the honor to propose, or only common or garden robbery? Ought we to manage a little murder in the thing, or what do you say to arson? Upon my word, man, I believe that you don’t realize that what you’ve said is an insult!”
“No, I don’t. You’re right there,” said the hardware merchant, in no wise ruffled. “But I do realize that you come pretty near being the dod-blamedest fool in Dearborn County.”
“Much obliged for the qualification, I’m sure,” retorted Horace, who felt the mists of his half-simulated, half-instinctive anger fading away before the steady breath of the other man’s purpose. “But I interrupt you. Pray go on.”
“There ain’t no question of dishonesty about the thing, not the slightest. I ain’t that kind of a man!” Horace permitted himself a shadowy smile, emphasized by a subdued little sniff, which Tenney caught and was pleased to appear to resent, “Thessaly knows me!” he said, with an air of pride. “They ain’t a living man—nor a dead one nuther—can put his finger on me. I’ve lived aboveboard, sir, and owe no man a red cent, and I defy anybody to so much as whisper a word about my character.”
“‘Tenney on Faith Justified by Works,’” commented Horace, softly, smiling as much as he dared, but in a less aggressive manner.
“Works—yes!” said the hardware merchant, “the Minster iron-works, in particular.” He seemed pleased with his little joke, and paused to dwell upon it in his mind for an instant. Then he went on, sitting upright in his chair now, and displaying a new earnestness:
“Dishonesty is wrong, and it is foolish. It gets a man disgraced, and it gets him in jail. But commercial acumen is another thing. A smart man can get money in a good many ways without giving anybody a chance to call him dishonest. I have thought out several plans—some of them strong at one point, others at another, but all pretty middlin’ good—how to feather our own nests out of this thing.”
“Well?” said Horace, interrogatively.
Mr. Tenney did not smile any more, and he had done with digressions. “First of all,” he said, with his intent gray eyes fixed on the young man’s face, “what guarantee have I that you won’t give me away?”
“What guaranteecanI give you?” replied Horace, also sitting up.
“Perhaps you are right,” said Tenney, thinking in his own swift-working mind that it would be easy enough to take care of this poor creature later on. “Well, then, you’ve been appointed Mrs. Minster’s lawyer in the interest of the Thessaly Manufacturing Company—this company here marked ‘D,’ in which the family has one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“I gathered as much. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me what it is all about.”
“I’m as transparent as plate-glass when I think a man is acting square with me,” said the hardware merchant. “This is how it is. Wendover and me got hold of a little rolling-mill and nail-works at Cadmus, down on the Southern Tier, a few years ago. Some silly people had put up the money for it, and there was a sort of half-crazy inventor fellow running it. They were making ducks and drakes of the whole thing, and I saw a chance of getting into the concern—I used to buy a good deal of hardware from them, and knew how they stood—and I spoke to Wendover, and so we went in.”
“That means that the other people were put out, I suppose,” commented Horace.
“Well, no; but they kind o’ faded away like. I wouldn’t exactly say they were put out, but after a while they didn’t seem to be able to stay in. But never mind them. Well, Cadmus was a bad location. The iron fields around there had pretty well petered out, and we were way off the main line of transportation. Business was fair enough; we made a straight ten per cent, year in and year out, because the thing was managed carefully; but that was in spite of a lot of drawbacks. So I got a scheme in my head to move the whole concern up here to Thessaly, and hitch it up with the Minster iron-works. We could save one dollar a ton, or forty-five thousand dollars in all, in the mere matter of freight alone, if we could use up their entire output. I may tell you, I didn’t appear in the business at all. I daresay Mrs. Minster don’t know to this day that I’m a kind of partner of hers. It happened that Wendover used to know her when she was a girl—they both come from down the Hudson somewhere—and so he worked the thing with her, and we moved over from Cadmus, hook, line, bob, and sinker, and we’re the Thessaly Manufacturing Company. Do you see?”
“So far, yes. She and her daughters have one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars cash in it. What is the rest of the company like?”
“It’s stocked at four hundred thousand dollars. We put in all our plant and machinery and business and good-will and so on at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and then we furnished seventy-five thousand dollars cash. So we hold two hundred and twenty-five shares to their one hundred and seventy-five.”
“Who are the ‘we’?”
“Well, Pete Wendover and me are about the only people you’re liable to meet around the premises, I guess. There are some other names on the books, but they don’t amount to much. We can wipe them off whenever we like.”
“I notice that this company has paid no dividends since it was formed.”
“That’s because of the expense of building. And we ain’t got what you may call fairly to work yet. But it’s all right. There is big money in it.”
“I daresay,” observed Horace. “But, if you will excuse the remark, I seem to have missed that part of your statement which referred tomymaking something out of the company.”
The hardware merchant allowed his cold eyes to twinkle for an instant. “You’ll be taken care of,” he said, confidentially. “Don’t fret your gizzard aboutthat!”
Horace smiled. It seemed to be easier to get on with Tenney than he had thought. “But what am I to do; that is, if I decide to do anything?” he asked. “I confess I don’t see your scheme.”
“Why, that’s curious,” said the other, with an air of candor. “And you lawyers have the name of being so ’cute, too!”
“I don’t suppose we see through a stone wall much farther than other people. Our chief advantage is in being able to recognize that it is a wall. And this one of yours seems to be as thick and opaque as most, I’m bound to say.”
“We don’t want you to do anything, just now,” Mr. Tenney explained. “Things may turn up in which you can be of assistance, and then we want to count on you, that’s all.”
This was a far less lucid explanation than Horace had looked for. Tenney had been so anxious for a confidential talk, and had hinted of such dazzling secrets, that this was a distinct disappointment.
“What did you mean by saying that I had the whole game in my hands?” he demanded, not dissembling his annoyance. “Thus far, you haven’t even dealt me any cards!”
Mr. Tenney lay back in his chair again, and surveyed Horace over his finger-tips. “There is to be a game, young man, and you’ve been put in a position to play in it when the time comes. But I should be a particularly simple kind of goose to tell you about it beforehand; now, wouldn’t I?”
Thus candidly appealed to, Horace could not but admit that his companion’s caution was defensible.
“Please yourself,” he said. “I daresay you’re right enough. I’ve got the position, as you say. Perhaps it is through you that it came to me; I’ll concede that, for argument’s sake. You are not a man who expects people to act from gratitude alone. Therefore you don’t count upon my doing things for you in this position, even though you put me there, unless you first convince me that they will also benefit me. That is clear enough, isn’t it? Very well; thus the matter stands. When the occasion arises that you need me, you can tell me what it is, and what I am to get out of it, and then we’ll talk business.”
Mr. Tenney had not lifted his eyes for a moment from his companion’s face. Had his own countenance been one on which inner feelings were easily reflected, it would just now have worn an expression of amused contempt.
“Well, this much I might as well tell you straight off,” he said. “A part of my notion, if everything goes smoothly, is to have Mrs. Minster put you into the Thessaly Manufacturing Company as her representative and to pay you five thousand dollars a year for it, which might be fixed so as to stand separate from the other work you do for her. Wendover can arrange that with her. And then I am counting now on declaring myself up at the Minster works, and putting in my time up there; so that your father will be needed again in the store, and it might be so that I could double his salary, and let him have back say a half interest in the business, and put him on his feet. I say these thingsmightbe done. I don’t say I’ve settled on them, mind!”
“And you still think it best to keep me in the dark; not to tell me what it is I’m to do?” Horace leant forward, and asked this question eagerly.
“No-o—I’ll tell you this much. Your business will be to say ditto to whatever me and Wendover say.”
A full minute’s pause ensued, during which Mr. Tenney gravely watched Horace sip what remained of his drink.
“Well, what shall it be? Do you go in with us?” he asked, at last.
“I’d better think it over,” said Horace. “Give me, say, till Monday—that’s five days. And of course, if I do say yes, it will be understood that I am not to be bound to do anything of a shady character.”
“Certainly; but you needn’t worry about that,” answered Tenney. “Everything will be as straight as a die. There will be nothing but a simple business transaction.”
“What did you mean by saying that we should take some of the Minster money away? That had a queer sound.”
“All business consists in getting other people’s money,” said the hardware merchant, sententiously. “Where do you suppose Steve Minster got his millions? Did you think he minted them? Didn’t every dollar pass through some other fellow’s pocket before it reached his? The only difference was that when it got into his pocket it stuck there. Everybody is looking out to get rich; and when a man succeeds, it only means that somebody else has got poor. That’s plain common-sense!”
The conversation practically ended here. Mr. Tenney devoted some quarter of an hour to going severally over all the papers in the Minster box, but glancing through only those few which referred to the Thessaly Manufacturing Company. The proceeding seemed to Horace to be irregular, but he could not well refuse, and Tenney was not interrupted. When he had finished his task he shook hands with Horace with a novel cordiality, and it was not difficult to guess that the result of his search had pleased him.
“You are sure those are all the papers Clarke left to be turned over?” he asked. Upon being assured in the affirmative his eyes emitted a glance which was like a flash of light, and his lip lifted in a smile of obvious elation.
“There’s a fortune for both of us,” he said, jubilantly, as he unlocked the door, and shook hands again.
When he had gone, Horace poured out another drink and sat down to meditate.
Four days of anxious meditation did not help Horace Boyce to clear his mind, and on the fifth he determined upon a somewhat desperate step, in the hope that its issue would assist decision.
His dilemma was simple enough in character. Two ways of acquiring a fortune lay before him. One was to marry Kate Minster; the other was to join the plot against her property and that of her family, which the subtile Tenney was darkly shaping.
The misery of the situation was that he must decide at once which of the ways he would choose. In his elation at being selected as the legal adviser and agent of these millionnaire women, no such contingency as this had been foreseen. He had assumed that abundant time would be at his disposal, and he had said to himself that with time all things may be accomplished with all women.
But this precious element of time had been harshly cut out of his plans, here at the very start. The few days reluctantly granted him had gone by, one by one, with cruel swiftness, and to-morrow would be Monday—and still his mind was not made up.
If he could be assured that Miss Minster would marry him, or at least admit him to the vantage-ground ofquasi-recognitionas a suitor, the difficulty would be solved at once. He would turn around and defend her and her people against the machinations of Tenney. Just what the machinations were he could not for the life of him puzzle out, but he felt sure that, whatever their nature, he could defeat them, if only he were given the right to do battle in the name of the family, as a prospective member of it.
On the other hand, it might be that he had no present chance with Miss Minster as an eligible husband. What would happen if he relied on a prospect which turned out not to exist? His own opportunity to share in the profits of Tenney’s plan would be abruptly extinguished, and his father would be thrown upon the world as a discredited bankrupt. About that there was no doubt.
Sometimes the distracted young man thought he caught glimpses of a safe middle course. In these sanguine moments it seemed feasible to give in his adhesion to Tenney’s scheme, and go along with him for a certain time, say until the intentions of the conspirators were revealed. Then he might suddenly revolt, throw himself into a virtuous attitude, and win credit and gratitude at the hands of the family by protecting them from their enemies. Then the game would be in his own hands, and no mistake!
But there were other times when this course did not present so many attractions to his mind—when it was borne in upon him that Tenney would be a dangerous kind of man to betray. He had seen merciless and terrible depths in the gray eyes of the hardware merchant—depths which somehow suggested bones stripped clean of their flesh, sucked bare of their marrow, at the bottom of a gloomy sea. In these seasons of doubt, which came mostly in the early morning when he first awoke, the mere thought of Tenney’s hatred made him shudder. It was as if Hugo’s devil-fish had crawled into his dreams.
So Sunday afternoon came and found the young man still perplexed and harassed. To do him justice, he had once or twice dwelt momentarily on the plan of simply defying Tenney and doing his duty by the Minsters, and taking his chances. But these impulses were as quickly put down. The case was too complicated for mere honesty. The days of martyrdom were long since past. One needed to be smarter than one’s neighbors in these later times. To eat others was the rule now, if one would save himself from being devoured. It was at least clear to his mind that he must be smart, and play his hand so as to get the odd trick even if honors were held against him.
Horace decided finally that the wisest thing he could do would be to call upon the Minsters before nightfall, and trust to luck for some opportunity of discovering Miss Kate’s state of mind toward him. He was troubled more or less by fears that Sunday might not be regarded in Thessaly as a proper day for calls, as he dressed himself for the adventure. But when he got upon the street, the fresh air and exhilaration oc exercise helped to reassure him. Before he reached the Minster gate he had even grown to feel that the ladies had probably had a dull day of it, and would welcome his advent as a diversion.
He was shown into the stately parlor to the left of the wide hall—a room he had not seen before—and left to sit there in solitude for some minutes. This term of waiting he employed in looking over the portraits on the wall and the photographs on the mantels and tables. Aside from several pictures of the dissipated Minster boy who had died, he could see no faces of young men anywhere, and he felt this to be a good sign as he tiptoed his way back to his seat by the window.
Fortune smiled at least upon the opening of his enterprise. It was Miss Kate who came at last to receive him, and she came alone. The young man’s cultured sense of beauty and breeding was caressed and captivated as it had never been before—at least in America, he made mental reservation—as she came across the room toward him, and held out her hand. He felt himself unexpectedly at ease, as he returned her greeting and looked with smiling warmth into her splendid eyes.
His talk was facile and pleasant. He touched lightly upon his doubts as to making calls on Sunday, and how they were overborne by the unspeakable tedium of his own rooms. Then he spoke of the way the more unconventional circles of London utilize the day, and of the contrasting features of the Continental Sunday. Miss Kate seemed interested, and besides explaining that her mother was writing letters and that her sister was not very well, bore a courteous and affable part in the exchange of small-talk.
For a long time nothing was said which enabled Horace to feel that the purpose of his visit had been or was likely to be served. Then, all at once, through a most unlikely channel, the needed personal element was introduced.
“Mamma tells me,” she said, when a moment’s pause had sufficed to dismiss some other subject, “that she has turned over to you such of her business as poor old Mr. Clarke used to take care of, and that your partner, Mr. Tracy, has nothing to do with that particular branch of your work. Isn’t that unusual? I thought partners always shared everything.”
“Oh, not at all,” replied Horace. “Mr. Tracy, for example, has railroad business which he keeps to himself. He is the attorney for this section of the road, and of course that is a personal appointment. He couldn’t share it with me, any more than the man in the story could make his wife and children corporals because he had been made one himself. Besides, Mr. Tracy was expressly mentioned by your mother as not to be included in the transfer of business. It was her notion.”
“Ah, indeed!” said that young woman, with a slight instantaneous lifting of the black brows which Horace did not catch. “Why? Isn’t he nice?”
“Well, yes; he’s an extremely good fellow, in his way,” the partner admitted, looking down at his glossy boots in well-simulated hesitation. “That little word ‘nice’ means so many things upon feminine lips, you know,” he added with a smile. “Perhaps he wouldn’t answer your definition of it all around. He’s very honest, and he is a prodigious worker, but—well, to be frank, he’s farm bred, and I daresay your mother suspected the existence of—what shall I say?—an uncouth side? Really, I don’t think that there was anything more than that in it.”
“So you furnish the polish, and he the honesty and industry? Is that it?”
The words were distinctly unpleasant, and Horace looked up swiftly to the speaker’s face, feeling that his own was flushed. But Miss Kate was smiling at him, with a quizzical light dancing in her eyes, and this reassured him on the instant. Evidently she felt herself on easy terms with him, and this was merely a bit of playful chaff.
“We don’t put it quite in that way,” he said, with an answering laugh. “It would be rather egotistical, on both sides.”
“Nowadays everybody resents that imputation as if it were a cardinal sin. There was a time when self-esteem was taken for granted. I suppose it went out with chain-armor and farthingales.” She spoke in a musing tone, and added after a tiny pause, “That must have been a happy time, at least for those who wore the armor and the brocades.”
Horace leaped with avidity at the opening. “Those were the days of romance,” he said, with an effort at the cooing effect in his voice. “Perhaps they were not so altogether lovely as our fancy paints them; but, all the same, it is very sweet to have the fancy. Whether it be historically true or not, those who possess it are rich in their own mind’s right. They can always escape from the grimy and commercial conditions of this present work-a-day life. All one’s finer senses can feed, for example, on a glowing account of an old-time tournament—with the sun shining on the armor and burnished shields, and the waving plumes and iron-clad horses and the heralds in tabards, and the rows of fair ladies clustered about the throne—as it is impossible to do on the report of a meeting of a board of directors, even when they declare you an exceptionally large dividend.”
The young man kept a close watch upon this flow of words as it proceeded, and felt satisfied with it. The young woman seemed to like it too, for she had sunk back into her chair with an added air of ease, and looked at him now with what he took to be a more sympathetic glance, as she made answer:
“Why, you are positively romantic, Mr. Boyce!”
“Me? My dear Miss Minster, I am the most sentimental person alive,” Horace protested gayly.
“Don’t you find that it interferes with your profession?” she asked, with that sparkle of banter in her dark eyes which he began to find so delicious. “I thought lawyers had to eschew sentiment. Or perhaps you supplythat, too, in this famous partnership of yours!”
Horace laughed with pleasure. “Would you like me the less if I admitted it?” he queried.
“How could I?” she replied on the instant, still with the smile which kept him from shaping a harsh interpretation of her words. “But isn’t Thessaly a rather incongruous place for sentimental people? We have no tourney-field—only rolling-mills and button-factories and furnaces; and there isn’t a knight, much less a herald in a tabard, left in the whole village. Their places have been taken by moulders and puddlers. So what will the minstrel do then, poor thing?”
“Let him come here sometimes,” said the young man, in the gravely ardent tone which this sort of situation demanded. “Let him come here, and forget that this is the nineteenth century; forget time and Thessaly altogether.”
“Oh, but mamma wouldn’t like that at all; I mean about your forgetting so much. She expects you particularly to remember both timeandThessaly. No, decidedly; that would never do!”
The smile and the glance were intoxicating. The young man made his plunge.
“ButmayI come?” His voice had become low and vibrant, and it went on eagerly: “May I come if I promise to remember everything; if I swear to remember nothing else save what you—and your mother—would have me charge my memory with?”
“We are always glad to see our friends on Tuesdays, from two to five.”
“But I am not in the plural,” he urged, gently.
“We are,” she made answer, still watching him with a smile, from where she half-reclined in the easy-chair. Her face was in the shadow of the heavier under-curtains; the mellow light gave it a uniform tint of ivory washed with rose, and enriched the wonder of her eyes, and softened into melting witchery the lines of lips and brows and of the raven diadem of curls upon her forehead.
“Yes; in that the graces and charms of a thousand perfect women are centred here in one,” murmured Horace. It was in his heart as well as his head to say more, but now she rose abruptly at this, with a laugh which for the instant disconcerted him.
“Oh, I foreseesucha future for this firm of yours,” she cried, with high merriment alike in voice and face.
As they both stood in the full light of the window, the young man somehow seemed to miss that yielding softness in her face which had lulled his sense and fired his senses in the misleading shadows of the curtain. It was still a very beautiful face, but there was a great deal of self-possession in it. Perhaps it would be as well just now to go no further.
“We must try to live up to your good opinion, and your kindly forecast,” he said, as he momentarily touched the hand she offered him. “You cannot possibly imagine how glad I am to have braved the conventionalities in calling, and to have found you at home. It has transformed the rural Sunday from a burden into a beatitude.”
“How pretty, Mr. Boyce! Is there any message for mamma?”
“Oh, why did you say that?” He ventured upon a tone of mock vexation. “I wanted so much to go away with the fancy that this was an enchanted palace, and that you were shut up alone in it, waiting for—”
“Tuesdays, from two till five,” she broke in, with a bow, in the same spirit of amiable raillery, and so he said good-by and made his way out.
Had he succeeded? Was there a promise of success? Horace took a long walk before he finally turned his steps homeward, and pondered these problems excitedly in his mind. On the whole, he concluded that he could win her. That she was for herself better worth the winning than even for her million, he said to himself over and over again with rapture.
Miss Kate went up-stairs and into the sitting-room common to the sisters, in which Ethel lay on the sofa in front of the fire-place. She knelt beside this sofa, and held her hands over the subdued flame of the maple sticks on the hearth.
“It is so cold down in the parlor,” she remarked, by way of explanation.
“He stayed an unconscionable while,” said Ethel. “What could he have talked about? I had almost a mind to waive my headache and come down to find out. It was a full hour.”
“He wouldn’t have thanked you if you had, my little girl,” replied Kate with a smile.
“Does he dislike little girls of nineteen so much? How unique!”
“No; but he came to make love to the big girl; that is why.”
Ethel sat bolt upright. “You don’t mean it!” she said, with her hazel eyes wide open.
“Hedid,” was the sententious reply. Kate was busy warming the backs of her hands now.
“Goodness me! And I lay here all the while, and never had so much as a premonition. Oh, what was it like? Did he get on his knees? Was it very,veryfunny? Make haste and tell me.”
“Well, itwasfunny, after a fashion. At least, we both laughed a good deal.”
“How touching! Well?”
“That is all. I laughed at him, and he laughed—I suppose it must have been at me—and he paid me some quite thrilling compliments, and I replied, ‘Tuesdays, from two to five,’ like an educated jackdaw—and—that was all.”
“What a romance! How could you think of such a clever answer, right on the spur of the moment, too? But I always said you were the bright one of the family, Kate. Perhaps one’s mind works better in the cold, anyway. But I think hemighthave knelt down. You should have put him close to the register. I daresay the cold stiffened his joints.”
“Will you ever be serious, child?”
Ethel took her sister’s head in her hands and turned it gently, so that she might look into the other’s face.
“Is it possible thatyouare serious, Kate?” she asked, in tender wonderment.
The elder girl laughed, and lifted herself to sit on the sofa beside Ethel.
“No, no; of course it isn’t possible,” she said, and put her arm about the invalid’s slender waist. “But he’s great fun to talk to. I chaffed him to my heart’s content, and he saw what I meant, every time, and didn’t mind in the least, and gave me as good as I sent. It’s such a relief to find somebody you can say saucy things to, and be quite sure they understand them. I began by disliking him—and heisas conceited as a popinjay—but then he comprehended everything so perfectly, and talked so well, that positively I found myself enjoying it. And he knew his own mind, too, and was resolved to say nice things to me, and said them, whether I liked or not.”
“Butdidyou ‘like,’ Kate?”
“No-o, I think not,” the girl replied, musingly. “But, all the same, there was a kind of satisfaction in hearing them, don’t you know.”
The younger girl drew her sister’s head down to her shoulder, and caressed it with her thin, white fingers.
“You are not going to let your mind drift into anything foolish, Kate?” she said, with a quaver of anxiety in her tone. “You don’t know the man. You don’t even like him. You told me so, even from what you saw of him on the train coming from New York. You said he patronized everybody and everything, and didn’t have a good word to say for any one. Don’t you know you did? And those first impressions are always nearest the truth.”
This recalled something to Kate’s mind. “You are right, puss,” she said. “Itisa failing of his. He spoke to-day almost contemptuously of his partner—that Mr. Tracy whom I met in the milliner’s shop; and that annoyed me at the time, for I liked Mr. Tracy’s looks and talk very much indeed,Ishouldn’t call him uncouth, at all.”
“That was that Boyce man’s word, was it?” commented Ethel. “Well, then, I think that beside his partner, he is a pretentious, disagreeable monkey—there!”
Kate smiled at her sister’s vehemence. “At least it is an unprejudiced judgment,” she said. “You don’t know either of them.”
“But I’ve seen them both,” replied Ethel, conclusively.
In the great field of armed politics in Europe, every now and again there arises a situation which everybody agrees must inevitably result in war. Yet just when the newspapers have reached their highest state of excitement, and “sensational incidents” and “significant occurrences” are crowding one another in the hurly-burly of alarmist despatches with utmost impressiveness, somehow the cloud passes away, and the sun comes out again—and nothing has happened.
The sun did not precisely shine for Horace Boyce in the weeks which now ensued, but at least the crisis that had threatened to engulf him was curiously delayed. Mr. Tenney did not even ask him, on that dreaded Monday, what decision he had arrived at. A number of other Mondays went by, and still no demand was made upon him to announce his choice. On the few occasions when he met his father’s partner, it was the pleasure of that gentleman to talk on other subjects.
The young man began to regain his equanimity. The February term of Oyer and Terminer had come and gone, and Horace was reasonably satisfied with the forensic display he had made. It would have been much better, he knew, if he had not been worried about the other thing; but, as it was, he had won two of the four cases in which he appeared, had got on well with the judge, who invited him to dinner at the Dearborn House, and had been congratulated on his speeches by quite a number of lawyers. His foothold in Thessaly was established.
Matters about the office had not gone altogether to his liking, it was true. For some reason, Reuben seemed all at once to have become more distant and formal with him. Horace could not dream that this arose from the discoveries his partner had made at the milliner’s shop, and so put the changed demeanor down vaguely to Reuben’s jealousy of his success in court. He was sorry that this was so, because he liked Reuben personally, and the silly fellow ought to be glad that he had such a showy and clever partner, instead of sulking. Horace began to harbor the notion that a year of this partnership would probably be enough for him.
The Citizens’ Club had held two meetings, and Horace felt that the manner in which he had presided and directed the course of action at these gatherings had increased his hold upon the town. Nearly fifty men had now joined the club, and next month they were to discuss the question of a permanent habitation. They all seemed to like him as president, and nebulous thoughts about being the first mayor of Thessaly, when the village should get its charter, now occasionally floated across the young man’s mind.
He had called at the Minster house on each Tuesday since that conversation with Miss Kate, and now felt himself to be on terms almost intimate with the whole household. He could not say, even to himself, that his suit had progressed much; but Miss Kate seemed to like him, and her mother, whom he also had seen at other times on matters of business, was very friendly indeed.
Thus affairs stood with the rising young lawyer at the beginning of March, when he one day received a note sent across by hand from Mr. Tenney, asking him to come over at once to the Dearborn House, and meet him in a certain room designated by number.
Horace was conscious of some passing surprise that Tenney should make appointments in private rooms of the local hotel, but as he crossed the street to the old tavern and climbed the stairs to the apartment named, it did not occur to him that the summons might signify that the crisis which had darkened the first weeks of February was come again.
He found Tenney awaiting him at the door, and after he had perfunctorily shaken hands with him, discovered that there was another man inside, seated at the table in the centre of the parlor, under the chandelier. This man was past middle-age, and both his hair and the thick, short beard which covered his chin and throat were nearly white. Horace noted first that his long upper lip was shaven, and this grated upon him afresh as one of the least lovely of provincial American customs. Then he observed that this man had eyes like Tenney’s in expression, though they were blue instead of gray; and as this resemblance came to him, Tenney spoke:
“Judge Wendover, this is the young man we’ve been talking about—Mr. Horace Boyce, son of my partner, the General, you know.”
The mysterious New Yorker had at last appeared on the scene, then. He did not look very mysterious, or very metropolitan either, as he rose slowly and reached his hand across the table for Horace to shake. It was a fat and inert hand, and the Judge himself, now that he stood up, was seen to be also fat and dumpy in figure, with a bald head, noticeably high at the back of the skull, and a loose, badly fitted suit of clothes.
“Sit down,” he said to Horace, much as if that young man had been a stenographer called in to report a conversation. Horace took the chair indicated, not over pleased.
“I haven’t got much time,” the Judge continued, speaking apparently to the papers in front of him. “There’s a good deal to do, and I’ve got to catch that 5.22 train.”
“New Yorkers generally do have to catch trains,” remarked Horace. “So far as I could see, the few times I’ve been there of late years, that is always the chief thing on their minds.”
Judge Wendover looked at the young man for the space of a second, and then turned to Tenney and said abruptly:
“I suppose he knows how the Thessaly Mfg. Company stands? How it’s stocked?” He pronounced the three letters with a slurring swiftness, as if to indicate that there was not time enough for the full word “manufacturing.”
Horace himself answered the question: “Yes, I know. You represent two hundred and twenty-five to my clients’ one hundred and seventy-five.” The young man held himself erect and alert in his chair, and spoke curtly.
“Just so. The capital is four hundred thousand dollars—all paid up. Well, we need that much more to go on.”
“How ‘go on’? What do you mean?”
“There’s a new nail machine just out which makes our plant worthless. To buy that, and make the changes, will cost a round four hundred thousand dollars. Get hold of that machine, and we control the whole United States market; fail to get it, we go under. That’s the long and short of it. That’s why we sent for you.”
“I’m very sorry,” said Horace, “but I don’t happen to have four hundred thousand dollars with me just at the moment. If you’d let me known earlier, now.”
The Judge looked at him again, with the impersonal point-blank stare of a very rich and pre-occupied old man. Evidently this young fellow thought himself a joker.
“Don’t fool,” he said, testily. “Business is business, time is money. We can’t increase our capital by law, but we can borrow. You haven’t got any money, but the Minster women have. It’s to their interest to stand by us. They’ve got almost as much in the concern as we have. I’ve seen the widow and explained the situation to her. She understands it. But she won’t back our paper, because her husband on his death-bed made her promise never to do that for anybody. Curious prejudice these countrymen have about indorsing notes. Business would stagnate in a day without indorsing. However, I had another plan. Let her issue four hundred thousand dollars in bonds on the iron-works. That’s about a third what they are worth. She’ll consent to that if you talk to her.”
“Oh,that’swhere I come in, is it?” said Horace.
“Where else did you suppose?” asked the Judge, puffing for breath, as he eyed the young man.
No answer was forthcoming, and the New Yorker went on:
“The interest on those bonds will cost her twenty-four thousand dollars per year for a year or two, but it will make her shares in the Mfg. Company a real property instead of a paper asset. Besides, I’ve shown her a way to-day, by going into the big pig-iron trust that is being formed, of making twice that amount in half the time. Now, she’s going to talk with you about both these things. Your play is to advise her to do what I’ve suggested.”
“Why should I?” Horace put the question bluntly.
“I’ll tell you,” answered the Judge, who seemed to like this direct way of dealing. “You can make a pot of money by it. And that isn’t all. Tenney and I are not fishing with pin-hooks and thread. We’ve got nets, young man. You tie up to us, and we’ll take care of you. When you see a big thing like this travelling your way, hitch on to it. That’s the way fortunes are made. And you’ve got a chance that don’t come to one young fellow in ten thousand.”
“I should think he had,” put in Mr. Tenney, who had been a silent but attentive auditor.
“What will happen if I decline?” asked Horace.
“She will lose her one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars and a good deal more, and you will lose your business with her and with everybody else.”
“And your father will lose the precious little he’s got left,” put in Mr. Tenney.
Horace tried to smile. “Upon my word, you are frank,” he said.
“There’s no time to be anything else,” replied the Judge. “And why shouldn’t we be? We simply state facts to you. A great commercial transaction, involving profits to everybody, is outlined before you. It happens that by my recommendation you are in a place where you can embarrass its success, for a minute or two, if you have a mind to. But why in God’s name you should have a mind to, or why you take up time by pretending to be offish about it, is more than I can make out. Damn it, sir, you’re not a woman, who wants to be asked a dozen times! You’re a man, lucky enough to be associated with other men who have their heads screwed on the right way, and so don’t waste any more time.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” said Horace, “I haven’t thanked you for recommending me.”
“You needn’t,” replied the Judge, bluntly. “It was Tenney’s doing. I didn’t know you from a side of sole-leather. Buthethought you were the right man for the place.”
“I hope you are not disappointed,” Horace remarked, with a questioning smile.
“A minute will tell me whether I am or not,” the New York man exclaimed, letting his fat hand fall upon the table. “Come, what is your answer? Are you with us, or against us?”
“At all events not against you, I should hope.”
“Damn the man! Hasn’t he got a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in him?—Tenney, you’re to blame for this,” snapped Wendover, pulling his watch from the fob in his tightened waistband, and scowling at the dial. “I’ll have to run, as it is.”
He rose again from his chair, and bent a sharp gaze upon Horace’s face.
“Well, young man,” he demanded, “what is your answer?”
“I think I can see my way to obliging you,” said Horace, hesitatingly. “But, of course, I want to know just how I am to stand in the—”
“That Tenney will see to,” said the Judge, swiftly. He gathered up the papers on the table, thrust them into a portfolio with a lock on it, which he gave to Tenney, snatched his hat, and was gone, without a word of adieu to anybody.
“Great man of business, that!” remarked the hardware merchant, after a moment of silence.
Horace nodded assent, but his mind had not followed the waddling figure of the financier. It was dwelling perplexedly upon the outcome of this adventure upon which he seemed to be fully embarked, and trying to establish a conviction that it would be easy to withdraw from it at will, later on.
“He can make millions where other men only see thousands, and they beyond their reach,” pursued Tenney, in an abstracted voice. “When he’s your friend, there isn’t anything you can’t do; and he’s as straight as a string, too, so long as he likes a man. But he’s a terror to have ag’in you.”
Horace sat closeted with Tenney for a long time, learning the details of the two plans which had been presented to Mrs. Minster, and which he was expected to support. The sharpest scrutiny could detect nothing dishonest in them. Both involved mere questions of expediency—to loan money in support of one’s stock, and to enter a trust which was to raise the price of one’s wares—and it was not difficult for Horace to argue himself into the belief that both promised to be beneficial to his client.
At the close of the interview Horace said plainly to his companion that he saw no reason why he should not advise Mrs. Minster to adopt both of the Judge’s recommendations. “They seem perfectly straightforward,” he added.
“Did you expect anything else, knowing me all this while?” asked Tenney, reproachfully.