REUBEN Tracy waited in his office next day for the visit of the milliner, but, to tell the truth, devoted very little thought to wondering about her errand.
The whole summer and autumn, as he sat now and smoked in meditation upon them, seemed to have been an utterly wasted period in his life. He had done nothing worth recalling. His mind had not even evolved good ideas. Through all the interval which lay between this November day and that afternoon in March, when he had been for the only time inside the Minster house, one solitary set thought had possessed his mind. Long ago it had formulated itself in his brain; found its way to the silent, spiritual tongue with which we speak to ourselves. He loved Kate Minster, and had had room for no other feeling all these months.
At first, when this thought was still new to him, he had hugged it to his heart with delight. Now the melancholy days indeed were come, and he had only suffering and disquiet from it. She had never even answered his letter proffering assistance. She was as far away from him, as coldly unattainable, as the north star. It made him wretched to muse upon her beauty and charm; his heart was weary with hopeless longing for her friendship—yet he was powerless to command either mind or heart. They clung to her with painful persistency; they kept her image before him, whispered her name in his ear, filled all his dreams with her fair presence, to make each wakening a fresh grief.
In his revolt against this weakness, Reuben had burned the little scented note for which so reverential a treasure-box had been made in his desk. But this was of no avail. He could never enter that small inner room where he now sat without glancing at the drawer which had once been consecrated to the letter.
It was humiliating that he should prove to have so little sense and strength. He bit his cigar fiercely with annoyance when this aspect of the case rose before him. If love meant anything, it meant a mutual sentiment. By all the lights of philosophy, it was not possible to love a person who did not return that love. This he said to himself over and over again, but the argument was not helpful. Still his mind remained perversely full of Kate Minster.
During all this time he had taken no step to probe the business which had formed the topic of that single disagreeable talk with his partner in the preceding March. Miss Minster’s failure to answer his letter had deeply wounded his pride, and had put it out of the question that he should seem to meddle in her affairs. He had never mentioned the subject again to Horace. The two young men had gone through the summer and autumn under the same office roof, engaged very often upon the same business, but with mutual formality and personal reserve. No controversy had arisen between them, but Reuben was conscious now that they had ceased to be friends, as men understand the term, for a long time.
For his own part, his dislike for his partner had grown so deep and strong that he felt doubly bound to guard himself against showing it. It was apparent to the most superficial introspection that a good deal of his aversion to Horace arose from the fact that he was on friendly terms with the Minsters, and could see Miss Kate every day. He never looked at his partner without remembering this, and extracting unhappiness from the thought. But he realized that this was all the more reason why he should not yield to his feelings. Both his pride and his sense of fairness restrained him from quarrelling with Horace on grounds of that sort.
But the events of the last day or two had opened afresh the former dilemma about a rupture over the Minster works business. Since Schuyler Tenney had blossomed forth as the visible head of the rolling-mills, Reuben had, in spite of his pique and of his resolution not to be betrayed into meddling, kept a close watch upon events connected with the two great iron manufacturing establishments. He had practically learned next to nothing, but he was none the less convinced that a swindle underlay what was going on.
It was with this same conviction that he now strove to understand the shutting-down of the furnaces and ore-fields owned by the Minsters, and the threatened lockout in the Thessaly Manufacturing Company’s mills. But it was very difficult to see where dishonesty could come in. The furnaces and ore-supply had been stopped by an order of the pig-iron trust, but of course the owners would be amply compensated for that. The other company’s resolve to reduce wages meant, equally of course, a desire to make up on the pay-list the loss entailed by the closing of the furnaces, which compelled it to secure its raw material elsewhere. Taken by themselves, each transaction was intelligible. But considered together, and as both advised by the same men, they seemed strangely in conflict. What possible reason could the Thessaly Company, for example, have for urging Mrs. Minster to enter a trust, the chief purpose of which was to raise the price of pig-iron which they themselves bought almost entirely? The problem puzzled Reuben. He racked his brain in futile search for the missing clew to this financial paradox. Evidently there was such a clew somewhere; an initial fact which would explain the whole mystery, if only it could be got at. He had for his own satisfaction collected some figures about the Minster business, partly exact, partly estimated, and he had worked laboriously over these in the effort to discover the false quantity which he felt sure was somewhere concealed. But thus far his work had been in vain.
Just now a strange idea for the moment fascinated his inclination. It was nothing else than the thought of putting his pride in his pocket—of going to Miss Minster and saying frankly: “I believe you are being robbed. In Heaven’s name, give me a chance to find out, and to protect you if I am right! I shall ask no reward. I shall not even ask ever to see you again, once the rescue is achieved. But oh! do not send me away until then—I pray you that!”
While the wild project urged itself upon his mind the man himself seemed able to stand apart and watch this battle of his own thoughts and longings, like an outside observer. He realized that the passion he had nursed so long in silence had affected his mental balance. He was conscious of surprise, almost of a hysterical kind of amusement, that Reuben Tracy should be so altered as to think twice about such a proceeding. Then he fell to deploring and angrily reviling the change that had come over him; and lo! all at once he found himself strangely glad of the change, and was stretching forth his arms in a fantasy of yearning toward a dream figure in creamy-white robes, girdled with a silken cord, and was crying out in his soul, “I love you!”
The vision faded away in an instant as there came the sound of rapping at the outer door. Reuben rose to his feet, his brain still bewildered by the sun-like brilliancy of the picture which had been burned into it, and confusedly collected his thoughts as he walked across the larger room. His partner had been out of town some days, and he had sent the office-boy home, in order that the Lawton girl might be able to talk in freedom. The knocking; was that of a woman’s hand. Evidently it was Jessica, who had come an hour or so earlier than she had appointed. He wondered vaguely what her errand might be, as he opened the door.
In the dingy hallway stood two figures instead of one, both thickly clad and half veiled. The waning light of late afternoon did not enable him to recognize his visitors with any certainty. The smaller lady of the two might be Jessica—the the who stood farthest away. He had almost resolved that it was, in this moment of mental dubiety, when the other, putting out her gloved hand, said to him:
“I am afraid you don’t remember me, it is so long since we met. This is my sister, Mr. Tracy—Miss Ethel Minster.”
The door-knob creaked in Reuben’s hand as he pressed upon it for support, and there were eccentric flashes of light before his eyes.
“Oh, I amsoglad!” was what he said. “Do come in—do come in.” He led the way into the office with a dazed sense of heading a triumphal procession, and then stopped in the centre of the room, suddenly remembering that he had not shaken hands. Was it too late now? To give himself time to think, he lighted the gas in both offices and closed all the shutters.
“Oh, I amsoglad!” he repeated, as he turned to the two ladies. The radiant smile on his face bore out his words. “I am afraid the little room—my own place—is full of cigar-smoke. Let me see about the fire here.” He shook the grate vehemently, and poked down the coals through one of the upper windows. “Perhaps it will be warm enough here. Let me bring some chairs.” He bustled into the inner room, and pushed out his own revolving desk-chair, and drew up two others from different ends of the office. The easiest chair of all, which was at Horace’s table, he did not touch. Then, when his two visitors had taken seats, he beamed down upon them once more, and said for the third time:
“I reallyamdelighted!”
Miss Kate put up her short veil with a frank gesture. The unaffected pleasure which shone in Reuben’s face and radiated from his manner was something more exuberant than she had expected, but it was grateful to her, and she and her sister both smiled in response.
“I have an apology to make first of all, Mr. Tracy,” she said, and her voice was the music of the seraphim to his senses. “I don’t think—I am afraid I never answered your kind letter last spring. It is a bad habit of mine; I am the worst correspondent in the world. And then we went away so soon afterward.”
“I beg that you won’t mention it,” said Reuben; and indeed it seemed to him to be a trivial thing now—not worth a thought, much less a word. He had taken a chair also, and was at once intoxicated with the rapture of looking Kate in the face thus again, and nervous lest the room was not warm enough.
“Won’t you loosen your wraps?” he asked, with solicitude. “I am afraid you won’t feel them when you go out.” It was an old formula which he had heard his mother use with callers at the farm, but which he himself had never uttered before in his life. But then he had never before been pervaded with such a tender anxiety for the small comforts of visitors.
Miss Kate opened the throat of her fur coat. “We sha’n’t stay long,” she said. “We must be home to dinner.” She paused for a moment and then asked: “Is there any likelihood of our seeing your partner, Mr. Boyce, here to-day?”
Reuben’s face fell on the instant. Alas, poor fool, he thought, to imagine there were angels’ visits for you!
“No,” he answered, gloomily. “I am afraid not. He is out of town.”
“Oh, we didn’t want to see him,” put in Miss Ethel. “Quite the contrary.”
Reuben’s countenance recovered all its luminous radiance. He stole a glance at this younger girl’s face, and felt that he almost loved her too.
“No,” Miss Kate went on, “in fact, we took the opportunity of his being away to come and try to see you alone. We are dreadfully anxious, Mr. Tracy, about the way things are going on.”
The lawyer could not restrain a comprehending nod of the head, but he did not speak.
“We do not understand at all what is being done,” proceeded Kate. “There is nobody to explain things to us except the men who are doing those things, and it seems to us that they tell us just what they like. We maybe doing them an injustice, but we are very nervous about a good many matters. That is why we came to you.”
Reuben bowed again. There was an instant’s pause, and then he opened one of the little mica doors in the stove. “I’m afraid this isn’t going to burn up,” he said. “If you don’t mind smoke, the other room is much warmer.”
It was not until he had safely bestowed his precious visitors in the cosier room, and persuaded them to loosen all their furs, that his mind was really at ease. “Now,” he remarked, with a smile of relief, “now go ahead. Tell me everything.”
“We have this difficulty,” said Kate, hesitatingly; “when I spoke to you before, you felt that you couldn’t act in the matter, or learn things, or advise us, on account of the partnership. And as that still exists—why—” She broke off with an inquiring sigh.
“My dear Miss Minster,” Reuben answered, in a voice so firm and full of force that it bore away in front of it all possibility of suspecting that he was too bold, “when I left you I wanted to tell you, when I wrote to you I tried to have you understand, that if there arose a question of honestly helping you, of protecting you, and the partnership stood between me and that act of honorable service, I would crush the partnership like an eggshell, and put all my powers at your disposal. But I am afraid you did not understand.”
The two girls looked at each other, and then at the strong face before them, with the focussed light of the argand burner upon it.
“No,” said Kate, “I am afraid we didn’t.”
“And so I say to you now,” pursued Reuben, with a sense of exultation in the resolute words as they sounded on his ear, “I will not allow any professional chimeras to bind me to inactivity, to acquiescence, if a wrong is being done to you. And more, I will do all that lies in my power to help you understand the whole situation. And if, when it is all mapped out before us, you need my assistance to set crooked things straight, why, with all my heart you shall have it, and the partnership shall go out of the window.”
“If you had said that at the beginning,” sighed Kate.
“Ah, then I did not know what I know now!” answered Reuben, holding her eyes with his, while the light on his face grew ruddier.
“Well, then, this is what I can tell you,” said the elder girl, “and I am to tell it to you as our lawyer, am I not—our lawyer in the sense that Mr. Boyce is mamma’s lawyer?”
Reuben bowed, and settled himself in his chair to listen. It was a long recital, broken now by suggestions from Ethel, now by questions from the lawyer. From time to time he made notes on the blotter before him, and when the narrative was finished he spent some moments in consulting these, and combining them with figures from another paper, in new columns. Then he said, speaking slowly and with deliberation:
“This I take to be the situation: You are millionnaires, and are in a strait for money. When I say ‘you’ I speak of your mother and yourselves as one. Your income, which formerly gave you a surplus of sixty thousand or seventy thousand dollars a year for new investments, is all at once not large enough to pay the interest on your debts, let alone your household and personal expenses. First, what has become of this income? It came from three sources—the furnaces, the telegraph stock, and a group of minor properties. These furnaces and iron-mines, which were all your own until you were persuaded to put a mortgage on them, have been closed by the orders of outsiders with whom you were persuaded to combine. Exit your income fromthatsource. Telegraph competition has cut down your earnings from the Northern Union stock to next to nothing. No doubt we shall find that your income from the other properties has been absorbed in salaries voted to themselves by the men into whose hands you have fallen. That is a very old trick, and I shall be surprised if it does not turn up here. In the second place, you are heavily in debt. On the 1st of January next, you must borrow money, apparently, to pay the interest on this debt. What makes it the harder is that you have not, as far as I can discover, had any value received whatever for this debt. In other words, you are being swindled out of something like one hundred thousand dollars per year, and not even such a property as your father left can standthatvery long. I should say it was high time you came to somebody for advice.”
Before this terribly lucid statement the two girls sat aghast.
It was Ethel who first found something to say. “We never dreamed of this, Mr. Tracy,” she said, breathlessly. “Our idea in coming, what we thought of most, was the poor people being thrown out of work in the winter, like this, and it being in some way,ourfault!”
“Peoplethinkit is our fault,” interposed Kate. “Only to-day, as we were driving here, there were some men standing on the corner, and one of them called out a very cruel thing about us, as if we had personally injured him. But what you tell me—is it really as bad as that?”
“I am afraid it is quite as bad as I have pictured it.”
“And what is to be done? There must be some way to stop it,” said Kate.
“You will put these men in prison the first thing, won’t you, Mr. Tracy?” asked Ethel. “And oh, I forgot! Who are the men who are robbing us?”
Reuben smiled gravely, and ignored the latter question. “There are a good many first things to do,” he said. “I must think it all over very carefully before any step is taken. But the very beginning will be, I think, for you both to revoke the power of attorney your mother holds for you, and to obtain a statement of her management of the trusteeship over your property.”
“She will refuse it plump! You don’t know mamma,” said Ethel.
“She couldn’t refuse if the demand were made regularly, could she, Mr. Tracy?” asked Kate. He shook his head, and she went on: “But it seems dreadful not to actwithmamma in the matter. Just think what a situation it will be, to bring our lawyer up to fight her lawyer! It sounds unnatural, doesn’t it? Don’t you think, Mr. Tracy, if you were to speak to her now—”
“No, that could hardly be, unless she asked me,” returned the lawyer.
“Well, then, if I told her all you said, or you wrote it out for me to show her.”
“No, nor that either,” said Reuben. “To speak frankly, Miss Minster, your mother is perhaps the most difficult and dangerous element in the whole problem. I hope you won’t be offended—but that any woman in her senses could have done what she seems to have done, is almost incredible.”
“Poor mamma!” commented Ethel. “She never would listen to advice.”
“Unfortunately, that is just what she has done,” broke in Kate. “Mr. Tracy, tell me candidly, is it possible that the man who advised her to do these things—or rather the two men, both lawyers, who advised her—could have done so honestly?”
“I should say it was impossible,” answered Reuben, after a pause.
Again the two girls exchanged glances, and then Kate, looking at her watch, rose to her feet. “We are already late, Mr. Tracy,” she said, offering him her hand, and unconsciously allowing him to hold it in his own as she went on: “We are both deeply indebted to you. We want you—oh, so much!—to help us. We will do everything you say; we will put ourselves completely in your hands, won’t we, Ethel?”
The younger sister said “Yes, indeed!” and then smiled as she furtively glanced up into Kate’s face and thence downward to her hand. Kate herself with a flush and murmur of confusion withdrew the fingers which the lawyer still held.
“Then you must begin,” he said, not striving very hard to conceal the delight he had had from that stolen custody of the gloved hand, “by resolving not to say a word to anybody—least of all to your mother—about having consulted me. You must realize that we have to deal with criminals—it is a harsh word, I know, but there can be no other—and that to give them warning before our plans are laid would be a folly almost amounting to crime itself. If I may, Miss Kate”—there was a little gulp in his throat as he safely passed this perilous first use of the familiar name—“I will write to you to-morrow, outlining my suggestions in detail, telling you what to do, perhaps something of what I am going to do, and naming a time—subject, of course, to your convenience—when we would better meet again.”
Thus, after some further words on the same lines, the interview ended. Reuben went to the door with them, and would have descended to the street to bear them company, but they begged him not to expose himself to the cold, and so, with gracious adieus, left him in his office and went down, the narrow, unlighted staircase, picking their way.
On the landing, where some faint reflection of the starlight and gas-light outside filtered through the musty atmosphere, Kate paused a moment to gather the weaker form of her sister protectingly close to her.
“Are you utterly tired out, pet?” she asked. “I’m afraid it’s been too much for you.”
“Oh, no,” said Ethel. “Only—yes, I am tired of one thing—of your slowness of perception. Why, child alive, Mr. Tracy has been just burning to take up our cause ever since he first saw you. You thought he was indifferent, and all the while he was over head and ears in love with you! I watched him every moment, and it was written all over his face; and you never saw it!”
The answering voice fell with a caressing imitation of reproof upon the darkness: “You silly puss, you think everybody is in love with me!” it said.
Then the two young ladies, furred and tippeted, emerged upon the sidewalk, stepped into their carriage, and were whirled off homeward under the starlight.
A few seconds later, two other figures, a woman and a child, also emerged from this same stairway, and, there being no coachman in waiting for them, started on foot down the street. The woman was Jessica Lawton, and she walked wearily with drooping head and shoulders, never once looking at the little boy whose hand she held, and who followed her in wondering patience.
She had stood in the stairway, drawn up against the wall to let these descending ladies pass. She had heard all they said, and had on the instant recognized Kate Minster’s voice. For a moment, in this darkness suddenly illumined by Ethel’s words, she had reflected. Then she, too, had turned and come down the stairs again. It seemed best, under these new circumstances, not to see Reuben Tracy just now. And as she slowly walked home, she almost forgot the existence of the little boy, so deeply was her mind engaged with what she had heard.
As for Reuben, the roseate dreams had all come back. From the drear mournfulness of chill November his heart had leaped, by a fairy transition, straight into the bowers of June, where birds sang and fountains plashed, and beauty and happiness were the only law. It would be time enough to-morrow to think about this great struggle with cunning scoundrels for the rescue of a princely fortune, which opened before him. This evening his mind should dwell upon nothing but thoughts ofher!
And so it happened that an hour later, when he decided to lock up the office and go over to supper, he had never once remembered that the Lawton girl’s appointment remained unkept.
Mr. Horace Boyce returned to Thessaly the next morning and drove at once to his father’s house. There, after a longer and more luxurious bath than usual, he breakfasted at his leisure, and then shaved and dressed himself with great care. He had brought some new clothes from New York, and as he put them on he did not regret the long detour to the metropolis, both in going to and coming from Pittsburg, which had been made in order to secure them. The frock coat was peculiarly to his liking. No noble dandy in all the West End of London owed his tailor for a more perfectly fitting garment. It was not easy to decide as to the neckwear which should best set off the admirable upper lines of this coat, but at last he settled on a lustreless, fine-ribbed tie of white silk, into which he set a beautiful moonstone pin that Miss Kate had once praised. Decidedly, theensembleleft nothing to be desired.
Horace, having completely satisfied himself, took off the coat again, went down-stairs in his velveteen lounging-jacket, and sought out his father in the library, which served as a smoking-room for the two men.
The General sat in one chair, with his feet comfortably disposed on another, and with a cup of coffee on still a third at his side. He was reading that morning’s ThessalyBanner, through passing clouds of cigar-smoke. His brow was troubled.
“Hello, you’re back, are you?” was his greeting to his son. “I see the whole crowd of workmen in your rolling-mills decided last night not to submit to the new scale; unanimous, the paper says. Seen it?”
“No, but I guessed they would,” said Horace, nonchalantly. “They can all be damned.”
The General turned over his paper. “There’s an editorial,” he went on, “taking the workmen’s side, out and out. Says there’s something very mysterious about the whole business. Winds up with a hint that steps will be taken to test the legality of the trust, and probe the conspiracy that underlies it. Those are the words—‘probe the conspiracy.’ Evidently, you’re going to have John Fairchild in your wool. He’s a good fighter, once you get him stirred up.”
“He can be damned, too,” said Horace, taking a chair and lighting a cigar. “These free-trade editors make a lot of noise, but they don’t do anything else. They’re merely blue-bottle flies on a window-pane—a deuce of a nuisance to nervous people, that’s all. I’m not nervous, myself.”
The General smiled with good-humored sarcasm at his offspring. “Seems to me it wasn’t so long ago that you were tarred with the same brush yourself,” he commented.
“Most fellows are free-traders until it touches their own pockets, or rather until they get something in their pockets to be touched. Then they learn sense,” replied Horace.
“You can count them by thousands,” said the General. “But what of the other poor devils—the millions of consumers who pay through the nose, in order to keep those pockets full, eh? They never seem to learn sense.”
Horace smiled a little, and then stretched out his limbs in a comprehensive yawn. “I can’t sleep on the cars as well as I used to,” he said, in explanation. “I almost wish now I’d gone to bed when I got home. I don’t want to be sleepythisafternoon, of all times.”
The General had returned to his paper. “I see there’s a story afloat that you chaps mean to bring in French Canadian workmen, when the other fellows are locked out. I thought there was a contract labor law against that.”
Horace yawned again, and then, rising, poured out a little glassful of spirits from a bottle on the mantel, and tossed it off. “No,” he said, “it’s easy enough to get around that. Wendover is up to all those dodges. Besides, I think they are already domiciled in Massachusetts.”
“Vane” Boyce laid down the paper and took off his eye-glasses. “I hope these fellows haven’t got you into a scrape,” he remarked, eyeing his son. “I don’t more than half like this whole business.”
“Don’t you worry,” was Horace’s easy response.
“I’ll take good care of myself. If it comes to ‘dog eat dog,’ they’ll find my teeth are filed down to a point quite as sharp as theirs are.”
“Maybe so,” said the father, doubtfully. “But that Tenney—he’s got eyes in the back of his head.”
“My dear fellow,” said Horace, with a pleasant air of patronage, “he’s a mere child compared with Wendover. But I’m not afraid of them both. I’m going to play a card this afternoon that will take the wind out of both their sails. When that is done, I’ll be in a position to lay down the law to them, and read the riot act too, if necessary.”
The General looked inquiry, and Horace went on: “I want you to call for me at the office at three, and then we’ll go together to the Minsters. I wouldn’t smoke after luncheon, if I were you. I’m not going down until afternoon. I’ll explain to you what my idea is as we walk out there. You’ve got some ‘heavy father’ business to do.”
Horace lay at his ease for a couple of hours in the big chair his father had vacated, and mused upon the splendor of his position. This afternoon he was to ask Kate Minster to be his wife, and of the answer he had no earthly doubt. His place thus made secure, he had some highly interesting things to say to Wendover and Tenney. He had fathomed their plans, he thought, and could at the right moment turn them to his advantage. He had not paid this latest visit to the iron magnates of Pennsylvania for nothing. He saw that Wendover had counted upon their postponing all discussion of the compensation to be given the Minsters for the closing of their furnaces until after January 1, in order that when that date came, and Mrs. Minster had not the money to pay the half-yearly twelve thousand dollars interest on the bonds, she would be compelled to borrow still more from him, and thus tighten the hold which he and Tenney had on the Minster property. It was a pretty scheme, but Horace felt that he could block it. For one thing, he was certain that he could induce the outside trust directors to pass upon the question of compensation long before January. And even if this failed, he could himself raise the money which Mrs. Minster would need. This he would do. Then he would turn around and demand an accounting from these scoundrels of the four hundred thousand dollars employed in buying the machinery rights, and levy upon the plant of the Thessaly Manufacturing Company, if necessary, to secure Mrs. Minster’s interests. It became all very clear to his mind, now he thought it over, and he metaphorically snapped his fingers at Wendover and Tenney as he went up-stairs and once more carefully dressed himself.
The young man stopped in the hall-way as he came down and enjoyed a comprehensive view of himself in the large mirror which was framed by the hat-rack. The frock coat and the white effect at the neck were excellent. The heavy fur collar of the outer coat only heightened their beauty, and the soft, fawn-tinted suède gloves were quite as charming in the contrast they afforded under the cuffs of the same costly fur. Horace put his glossy hat just a trifle to one side, and was too happy even to curse the climate which made rubbers over his patent-leather shoes a necessity.
He remembered that minute before the looking-glass, in the after-time, as the culmination of his upward career. It was the proudest, most perfectly contented moment of his adult life.
“There is something I want to say to you before you go.”
Reuben Tracy stood at the door of a small inner office, and looked steadily at his partner as he uttered these words.
There was little doing in the law in these few dead-and-alive weeks between terms, and the exquisitely dressed Horace, having gone through his letters and signed some few papers, still with one of his gloves on, had decided not to wait for his father, but to call instead at the hardware store.
“I am in a bit of a hurry just now.” he said, drawing on the other glove. “I may look in again before dinner. Won’t it keep till then?”
“It isn’t very long,” answered Reuben. “I’ve concluded that the partnership was a mistake. It is open to either of us to terminate it at will. I wish you would look around, and let me know as soon as you see your way to—to—”
“To getting out,” interposed Horace. In his present mood the idea rather pleased him than otherwise. “With the greatest pleasure in the world. You have not been alone in thinking that the partnership was a mistake, I can assure you.”
“Then we understand each other?”
“Perfectly.”
“And you will be back, say at—”
“Say at half-past five.”
“Half-past five be it,” said Reuben, turning back again to his desk.
Horace made his way across the muddy high street and found his father, who smelt rather more of tobacco than could have been wished, but otherwise was in complete readiness.
“By the way,” remarked the young man, as the two walked briskly along, “I’ve given Tracy notice that I’m going to leave the firm. I daresay we shall separate almost immediately. The business hasn’t been by any means up to my expectations, and, besides, I have too much already to do for the Minster estate, and am by way, now, of having a good deal more.”
“I’m sorry, for all that,” said the General. “Tracy is a first-rate, honest, straightforward fellow. It always did me good to feel that you were with him. To tell you the truth, my boy,” he went on after a pause, “I’m damnably uneasy about your being so thick with Tenney and that gang, and separating yourself from Tracy. It has an unsafe look.”
“Tracy is a tiresome prig,” was Horace’s comment. “I’ve stood him quite long enough.”
The conversation turned now upon the object of their expedition, and when this had been explained to the General, and his part in it outlined, he had forgotten his forebodings about his son’s future.
That son himself, as he strode along, with his head well up and his shoulders squared, was physically an object upon which the paternal eye could look with entire pride. The General said to himself that he was not only the best-dressed, but the handsomest young fellow in all Dearborn County; and from this it was but a mental flash to the recollection that the Boyces had always been handsome fellows, and the old soldier recalled with satisfaction how well he himself had felt that he looked when he rode away from Thessaly at the head of his regiment after the firing on Fort Sumter.
Mrs. Minster came down alone to the drawingroom to receive her visitors, and showed by her manner some surprise that the General accompanied his son.
“I rather wanted to talk with you about what you learned at Pittsburg,” she said, somewhat bluntly, to Horace, after conversation on ordinary topics had begun to flag.
The General rose at this. “Pray let me go into the library for a time, I beg of you,” he said, in his courtly, cheery manner. “I know the way, and I can amuse myself there till you want me; that is,” he added, with a twinkle in his eye, “if you decide that you want me at all.”
Mrs. Minster bowed as the General went off. She did not quite understand what this stout, red-faced man meant by being wanted, and she was extremely anxious to know all that her lawyer had to tell her about the trust.
What he had to tell her was eminently satisfactory. The directors had postponed the question of how much money should be paid for the shutting-down of the Minster furnaces, simply because it was taken for granted that so opulent a concern could not be in a hurry about a settlement. He was sure that he could have the affair all arranged before December. As to other matters, he was equally confident. A year hence she would be in vastly better condition, financially, than she had ever been before. Under these assurances Mrs. Minster purred visible content.
Then Horace began to introduce the subject nearest his heart. The family had been excessively kind to him during the summer, he said. He had been privileged to meet them on terms of almost intimacy, both here and elsewhere. Every day of this delightful intercourse had but strengthened his original desire. True to his word, he had never uttered a syllable of what lay on his heart to Miss Kate, but he was not without confidence that she looked upon him favorably. They had seemed always the best of friends, and she had accepted from him attentions which must have shadowed forth to her, at least vaguely, the state of his mind. He had brought his father—in accordance with what he felt to be the courtesy due from one old family to another—to formally speak with her upon the subject, if she desired it, and then he himself, if she thought it best, would beg for an interview with Miss Kate. Or did Mrs. Minster think it preferable to leave this latter to the sweet arbitrament of chance?
Horace looked so well in his new clothes, and talked with such fluency of feeling, and moreover had brought such comforting intelligence about the business troubles, that Mrs. Minster found herself at the end smiling on him maternally, and murmuring some sort of acquiescence to his remarks in general.
“Then shall I bring in my father?” He asked the question eagerly, and rising before she could reply, went swiftly to the door of the hall and opened it.
Then he stopped with abruptness, and held the door open with a hand that began to tremble as the color left his face.
A voice in the hall was speaking, and with such sharply defined distinctness and high volume that each word reached even the mother where she sat.
“You may tell your son, General Boyce,”said this voice,“that I will not see him. I am sorry to have to say it to you, who have always been polite to me, but your son is not a good man or an honest man, and I wish never to see him again. With all my heart I wish, too, that we never had seen him, any of us.”
An indistinct sound of pained remonstrance arose outside as the echoes of this first voice died away. Then followed a noise of footsteps ascending the carpeted stairs, and Horace’s empty, staring eyes had a momentary vision of a woman’s form passing rapidly upward, away from him.
Then he stood face to face with his father—a bleared, swollen, indignant countenance it was that thrust itself close to his—and he heard his father say, huskily:
“I am going. Let us get out of this house.”
Horace mechanically started to follow. Then he remembered that he had left his hat behind, and went back into the drawing-room where Mrs. Minster sat. The absence of deep emotion on her statuesque face momentarily restored his own presence of mind.
“You have heard your daughter?” he said, his head hanging in spite of himself, but his eyes keeping a strenuous scrutiny upon her face.
“Yes: I don’t know what has come over Kate, lately,” remarked Mrs. Minster; “she always was the most curious girl.”
“Curious, indeed!” He choked down the sneer which tempted him, and went on slowly: “You heard what she said—that I was dishonest, wicked. Where she has suddenly got this new view of me, doesn’t matter—at least, just at this moment. But I surely ought to ask if you—if you share it. Of course, if I haven’t your confidence, why, I must lay down everything.”
“Oh, mercy, no! You mustn’t think of it,” the lady said, with animation. “I’m sure I don’t know in the least what it all means. I never do know with my daughters. They get all sorts of crazy notions. It makes my head ache sometimes wondering what they will do next—Kate, especially. No, you mustn’t mind her. You really mustn’t.”
The young man’s manner had gradually taken on firmness, as if under a coat of ice. The glance which he still bent upon Mrs. Minster had a novel glitter in it now.
“Then I am to remain your lawyer, in spite of this, as if it hadn’t happened?”
“Why, bless me, yes! Why not? Girls will be girls, I suppose. At least, that is the saying. But—oh, by all means! You must see me through this dreadful trust business, though, as you say, it must all be better in the end than ever before.”
“Good-day, Mrs. Minster. I shall continue, then, to hold myself at your service.”
He spoke with the same grave slowness, and bowed formally, as if to go.
The lady rose, and of her own volition offered him her hand. “Perhaps things will alter in her mind. I am so sorry!” she said.
The young man permitted himself a ghostly half-smile. “It is only when I have thought it all over that I shall know whether I am sorry or not,” he said, and bowing again he left her.
Out by the gate, standing on the gravel-path wet with November rain and strewn with damp, fallen leaves, the General waited for him. The air had grown chill, and the sky was spreading a canopy for the night of gloomy gray clouds. The two men, without a word, fell into step, and walked down the street together. What was there to say?
Horace, striding silently along with his teeth tight set, his head bowed and full of fierce confusion of thought, and his eyes angrily fixed on the nothing straight ahead, became, all at once, aware that his office-boy was approaching on the sidewalk, whistling dolefully to suit the weather, and carrying his hands in his pockets.
“Where are you going, Robert?” the lawyer demanded, stopping the lad, and speaking with the aggressive abruptness of a man longing to affront all about him.
“To Mrs. Minster’s,” answered the boy, wondering what was up, and confusedly taking his hands out of his pockets.
“What for?” This second question was even more sharply put.
“This letter from Mr. Tracy.” The boy took a letter from the inside of his coat, and then added: “I said Mrs. Minster, but the letter is for her daughter. I’m to give it to her herself.”
“I’ll take charge of it myself,” said Horace, with swift decision, stretching out his hand.
But another hand was reached forth also, and grasped the young man’s extended wrist with a vehement grip.
“No, by God! you won’t!” swore the General, his face purpling with the rush of angry blood, and his little gray eyes flashing. “No, sir, you won’t!” he repeated; and then, bending a momentary glance upon the boy, he snapped out: “Well, you! don’t stand staring here! Go and do your errand as you were told!”
The office-boy started with a run to obey his command, and did not slacken his pace until he had turned a corner. He had never encountered a real general in action before, and the experience impressed him.
Father and son looked in silence into each other’s faces for an instant. Then the father said, with something between a curse and a groan:
“My God! the girl was right! Youarea damned scoundrel!”
“Well, however that may be,” replied Horace, frowning, “I’m not in the mood just now to take any cheek, least of all from you!”
As the General stared at him with swelling rage in his fat face, and quivering, inarticulate lips, his son went on in a bitter voice, from between clinched teeth:
“I owe this to you! to nobody else but you! Everything I did was done to lift you out of the gutter, to try and make a man of you again, to put you back into decent society—to have the name of Boyce something else once more besides a butt for bar-keepers and factory-girls. I had you around my neck like a mill-stone, and you’ve pulled me down. I hope you’re satisfied!”
For a moment it seemed as if the General would fall. His thick neck grew scarlet, his eyes turned opaque and filled with tears, and he trembled and almost tottered on his legs. Then the fit passed as suddenly as it had come. He threw a sweeping glance up and down the figure of his son—taking in the elegant line of the trousers, the costly fur, the delicate, spotless gloves, the white jewelled neckwear, the shining hat, the hardened and angry face beneath it—and then broke boisterously forth into a loud guffaw of contemptuous laughter.
When he had laughed his fill, he turned upon his heel without a word and walked away, carrying himself with proud erectness, and thumping his umbrella on the sidewalk with each step as he went.