CHAPTER IIAUNT REBECCA
No sooner was Mrs. Melville ushered into her section than the colonel went through the train. He was not so suspicious as he told himself he might have been, with such a dovetailing of circumstances into his accidentally captured information; he couldn’t yet read villainy on that college lad’s frank face. But no reason, therefore, to neglect precautions. “Hope the best of men and prepare for the worst,” was the old campaigner’s motto.
A walk through the cars showed him no signs of the two men. It was a tolerably complete inspection, too. There was only one drawing-room or state-room of which he did not manage to get a glimpse—the closed room being the property of a very great financial magnate, whose private car was waiting for him in Denver. His door was fast, and the click of the type-writer announced the tireless industry of our rulers.
But if he did not find the college boy or the manwith the moles he did get a surprise for his walk; namely, the sight of the family of Haley, and Haley himself beside their trig, battered luggage, in a section of the car next his own. Mrs. Haley turned a guilty red, while Haley essayed a stolid demeanor.
“What does this mean?” demanded the colonel.
“Haley felt he wouldhaveto go with you, Colonel,” replied Mrs. Haley, who had timid, wide, blue eyes and the voice of a bird, but a courage under her panic, as birds have, too, when their nests are in peril. “We’ve rinted the house to a good man with grown-up children, and Haley can get a job if you won’t want him.”
“Yis, sor,” mumbled Haley. He was standing at attention, as was his wife, the toddling Nora being held in the posture of respect on the plush seat.
“And I suppose you took the furniture money to buy tickets?”
“Yis, sor.”
“And you’re bound to go with me?”
“Yis, sor,” said Haley.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Sergeant,” said the colonel; but he was glad at the heart of him for this mutinous loyalty.
“Yis, sor,” said Haley.
“Well, since you are here, I engage you from to-day, you understand.”
“Yis, sor,” said Haley. Mrs. Haley whimpered a blessing; but the only change in the soldier was that his military stolidity became natural and real instead of forced.
“Sit down on this seat over here with me and I’ll tell you what I want. You fraud, letting me say good-by to you—”
“I didn’t want to take the liberty, sor, but youmademe shake hands. I was afraid you’d catch on, sor. ’Tis a weight off me moind, sor.”
“I dare say. You always have your way with me, you old mule. Now listen; I want you to be on the watch for two men”—thereupon the colonel described his men, laying special stress on the moles on the face of one, and the other’s dimple.
Having set Haley his tasks, he went back to his car in better spirits.
By this time the train was moving. He had seen his kinswoman and her party enter; and he found the object of Mrs. Melville’s darksome warnings sitting with a slender lad in the main body of the car. Aunt Rebecca was in the drawing-room, her maid with her. Mrs. Melville, whohad already revealed her presence, sat across the aisle. She presented the colonel at once.
Miss Smith did not look formidable; she looked “nice,” thought the colonel. She was of medium height; she was obviously plump, although well proportioned; her presence had an effect of radiant cleanliness, her eyes were so luminous and her teeth so fine and her white shirt-waist so immaculate. There was about her a certain soft illumination of cheerfulness, and at the same time a restful repose; she moved in a leisurely fashion and she sat perfectly still. “I never saw any one who looked less of an adventuress,” Winter was thinking, as he bowed. Then swiftly his glance went to the lad, a pale young fellow with hazel eyes and a long slim hand which felt cold.
The boy made a little inarticulate sound in his throat and blushed when Colonel Winter addressed him. But he looked the brighter for the blush. It was not a plain face; rather an interesting one in spite of its listlessness and its sickly pallor; its oval was purely cut, the delicate mouth was closed firmly enough, and the hazel eyes with their long lashes would be beautiful were they not so veiled.
“He has the Winter mouth, at least,” noted thecolonel. He felt a novel throb at his heart. Had his own boy lived, the baby that died when it was born, he would be only a year older than Archie. At least, this boy was of his own blood. Without father or mother, butnotalone in the world; and, if any danger menaced, not without defenders. The depression which had enveloped him lifted as mist before the sun, burned away by the mere thought of possible difficulties. “We will see if any one swindles you out of your share,” said Rupert Winter, compressing the Winter mouth more firmly, “or if those gentlemanly kidnappers mean you.”
His ebbing suspicion of the boy’s companion revived; he would be on his guard, all right.
“Aunt Rebecca wants to see you,” Mrs. Melville suggested. “She is in the drawing-room with her solitaire.”
“Still playing Penelope’s Web?”
“Oh, she always comes back to it. But she plays bridge, too; Rupert, I hear your game is a wonder. Archie’s been learning, so he could play with you.”
“Good for Archie!”—he shot a glance and a smile at the lad’s reddening face—“we’ll have a game.”
“Lord, I wish he didn’t look quite so ladylike,” he was grumbling within, as he dutifully made his way to his aunt’s presence.
The electric lights flooded the flimsy railway table on which were spread rows of small-sized cards. An elderly lady of quality was musing over the pasteboard rows. A lady of quality—that was distinctly the phrase to catch one’s fancy at the first glimpse of Mrs. Winter. Not an aged lady, either, for even at eighty that elegantly moulded, slim figure, that abundance of silvery hair—parted in the middle and growing thickly on each side in nature’s own fashion, which art can not counterfeit, as well as softly puffed and massed above—that exquisitely colored and textured skin, strangely smooth for her years, with tiny wrinkles of humor, to be sure, about the eyes, but with cheeks and skin unmarred; that fine, firmly carved profile, those black eyebrows and lashes and still brilliant dark eyes; most of all that erect, alert, dainty carriage, gave no impression of age; but they all, and their accessories of toilet and manner, and a little prim touch of an older, more reticent day in both dress and bearing, recalled the last century phrase.
A soft gray bunch of chinchilla fur lay whereshe had slipped it on her soft gray skirts; one hand rested in the fur—her left hand—and on the third finger were the only rings which she wore, a band of gold, worn by sixty years, and a wonderful ruby, wherein (at least such was Rupert’s phantasy) a writhing flame was held captive by its guard of diamond icicles. The same rings admired by her nephew ever since he was a cadet—just the same smiling, inscrutable, high-bred, unchanging old dame!
“Good evening, Aunt Rebecca; not a day older!” said the colonel.
“Good evening, Bertie,” returned the lady, extending a hand over the cards; “excuse my not rising to greet you; I might joggle the cards. Of course I’m not a day older; I don’t dare to grow older at my age! Sit down. I’m extremely glad to see you; I’ve a heap to talk to you about. Do you mind if I run this game through first?”
The colonel didn’t mind. He raised the proffered hand to his lips; such homage seemed quite the most natural act in the world with Mrs. Winter. And he unobtrusively edged his own lean and wiry person into the vacant seat opposite her.
“How far are you going?” said she, after a few moves of the cards.
“My ticket says Los Angeles; but it had to say something, so I chose Los Angeles for luck; I’m an irresponsible tramp now, you know; and I may drop off almost anywhere. You are for southern California, aren’t you?”
“Eventually; but we shall stop at San Francisco for two or three weeks.”
“Do you mind if I stop off with you? I want to get acquainted with my ward,” said the colonel.
“That’s a good idea, Bertie.”
“He seems rather out of sorts; you aren’t worried about—well, tuberculosis or that sort of thing?”
“I am worried about just that sort of thing; although the doctor says nothing organic at all is the matter with him; but he is too melancholy for a boy; he needs rousing; losing his father and mother in one year, you know, and he was devoted to them. I can’t quite make him out, Bertie; he hasn’t the Winter temperament. I suppose he has a legal right to his mother’s nature; but it is very annoying. It makes him so much harder to understand—not that she wasn’t a good woman who made Tom happy; but she wasn’t a Winter. However, Janet has brightened him up considerably—you’veseen Janet—Miss Smith? What do you think of her?”
Winter said honestly that she was very nice-looking and that she looked right capable; he fell into the idiom of his youth sometimes when with a Southerner.
“She is,” said Aunt Rebecca.
“Where did you find her?” asked the colonel carelessly, inspecting the cards.
Aunt Rebecca smiled. “I thought Millicent would have given you all the particulars. She was nurse, secretary, companion and diet cook to Cousin Angela Nelson; whenshedied I got her. Lucky for me.”
“So I should judge,” commented the colonel politely.
“I presume Millicent has told you that she is an adventuress and after my money and a heap more stuff. If she hasn’t she will. Get a notion once in Millicent’s head and a surgical operation is necessary to dislodge it! Janet is the only mortal person who could live with poor Cousin Angela, who had enough real diseases to kill her and enough imaginary ones to kill anybody who lived with her! Janet made her comfortable, would not stand everything on earth from her—though shedid stand a heap—and really cared for her. When she died Cousin Angela left her some money; not very much, but a few thousands. She would have left her more, but Janet wouldn’t let her. She left some to some old servants, who surely deserved it for living withher, some to charities and the rest to her sisters, who hadn’t put a foot inside the house for fifteen years, but naturally resented her not giving them everything. I reckon they filled Millicent up with their notions.” She pushed the outspread cards together.
“You had several moves left,” said the colonel.
“Four. But then, I was finished. Bertie, you play bridge, of course; and I used to hear of your whist triumphs; how did you happen to take to whist?”
“To fill up the time, I reckon. I began it years ago. Now a soldier’s life is a great deal more varied, because a man will be shifted around and get a show of the different kinds of service. And there are the exams, and the Philippines—oh, plenty of diversions. But in the old days a man in the line was billed for an awfully stupid time. I didn’t care to take to drink; and I couldn’t read as you do if I’d had books, which I hadn’t, so I took to playing cards. I played skat and poker andwhist, and of late years I’ve played bridge. Millicent plays?”
“Millicent is a celebrated player. She was a great duplicate-whist player, you know. To see Millicent in her glory, one should play duplicate with her. I’m only a chump player; my sole object is to win tricks.”
“What else should it be?”
Aunt Rebecca smiled upon him. “To give information to your partner. The main object of the celebrated American-leads system is signaling information to your partner. Incidentally, one tells the adversaries, as well as one’s partner, which, however, doesn’t count really as much as you might think; for most people don’t notice what their partners playverymuch, and don’t notice what their adversaries play at all. Millicent is always so busy indicating things to her partner and watching for his signals and his indications that you can run a cross ruff in on her without her suspecting. She asked me once if she didn’t play an intelligible game, and I told her she did; a babe in arms could understand it. She didn’t seem quite pleased.”
“How about Archie? Can he play a good game?”
“Very fair for a boy of fourteen; he was fond of whist until his troubles came,” said Mrs. Winter, with a faint clouding of her keen gaze. “Since then he hasn’t taken much interest in anything. Janet has brightened him up more than any one; and when he heard you were coming that did rouse him. You are one of his heroes. He’s that sort of a boy,” she added, with a tinge of impatience in her soft Southern voice. As if to divert her thoughts, she began deftly moving the cards before her. Her hands showed the blue veins more prominently than they show in young hands. This was their only surrender to time; they were shapely and white, and the slim fingers were as straight as when the beaux of Fairfax County would have ridden all day for a chance to kiss them.
The colonel watched the great ruby wink and glow. The ruby was a part of his memories of his aunt; she had always worn it. He remembered it, when she used to come and visit him at the hotel at West Point, dazzling impartially officers, professors, cadets and hotel waiters. Was that almost forty years ago? Well, thirty-four, anyhow! She had been very good, very generous to all the young Winters, then. Indeed, althoughshe never quite forgave him for not marrying the wife of her selecting, she had always been kind and generous to Rupert; yet, somehow, while he had admired and found a humorous joy in his Aunt Rebecca, he wondered if he had ever loved her. She was both beautiful and brilliant when she was young, a Southern belle, a Northern society leader; her life was full of conquests; her footsteps, which had wandered over the world, had left a phosphorescent wake of admiration. She had always been a personage. She was a power in Washington after the war; they had found her uniquely delightful in royal courts long before Americans were the fashion; she had been of importance in New York, and they had loved her epigrams in Boston; now, in her old age, she held a veritable little court of her own in the provincial Western city which had been her husband’s home. He went to Congress from Fairport; he had made a fortune there, and when he died, many years ago, in Egypt, back to his Western home, with dogged determination and lavish expenditures of both money and wit, his widow had brought him to rest. The most intense and solemn experience of a woman she had missed, for no children had come to them, but her husbandhad been her lover so long as he lived, and she had loved him. She had known great men; she had lived through wonderful events; and often her hand had been on those secret levers which move vast forces. She had been in tragedies, if an inviolable coolness of head, perhaps of heart, had shielded her from being of them. The husband of her youth, the nearest of her blood, the friends of her middle life—all had gone into the dark; yet here she sat, with her smooth skin and her still lustrous eyes and her fragrant hands, keenly smiling over her solitaire. The colonel wondered if he could ever reconcile himself with such philosophy to his own narrowed and emptied life; she was older than he, yet she could still find a zest in existence. All the great passions gone; all the big interests; and still her clever mind was working, happy, possibly, in its mere exercise, disdaining the stake, she who had had every success. What a vitality! He looked at her, puzzling. Her complexity bewildered him, he not being of a complex nature himself. As he looked, suddenly he found himself questioning why her face, in its revival of youthful smoothness and tint, recalled some other face, recently studied by him—a face that had worn an absolutelydifferent expression; having the same delicate aquiline nose, the same oval contour, the same wide brows—who? who? queried the colonel. Then he nodded. Of course; it was the man with the moles, the brother. He looked enough like Mrs. Winter to be her kinsman. At once he put his guess to the test. “Aunt Becky,” said he, “have you any kin I don’t know about?”
“I reckon not. I’m an awfully kinless old party,” said she serenely. “I was a Winter, born as well as married, and so you and Mel and Archie are double kin to me. I was an only child, so I haven’t anything closer than third or fourth cousins, down in Virginia and Boston.”
“Have you, by chance, any cousin, near or far, named Mercer?”
Resting her finger-tips on the cards, Aunt Rebecca seemed to let her mind search amid Virginian and Massachusetts genealogical tables. “Why, certainly,” she answered after a pause, “there was General Philemon Mercer—Confederate army, you know—and his son, Sam Nelson; Phil was my own cousin and Sam Nelson my second, and Sam Nelson’s sons would be my third, wouldn’t they? Phil and Sam are both dead, and Winnie Lee, the daughter, is dead, and poor Phil—thegrandson, you know—poor boy,heshot himself while at Harvard; but his brother Cary is alive.”
“Do you know him?”
“Never saw him but once or twice. He has very good manners.”
“Is he rich?”
“He was, but after he had spent his youth working with incredible industry and a great deal of ability to build up a steel business and had put it into a little combination—not a big trust, just a genuine corporation—some of the financial princes wanted it for a club—to knock down bigger game, I reckon—and proceeded to cheapen the stock in order to control it. Cary held on desperately, bought more than he could hold, mortgaged everything else; but they were too big for him to fight. It was in 1903, you know, when they had an alleged financial panic, and scared the banks. Cary went to the wall, and Phil with him, and poor Phil killed himself. Afterward Cary’s wife died; he surely did have a mean time. And, to tell you the truth, Bertie, I think there has been a little kink in Cary’s mind ever since.”
“Did you hold any of Cary’s stock?” He was piecing his puzzle together.
“Yes, but my stock was all paid for, and I held on to it; now it is over par and paying dividends. Oh, the property was all right, had it been kept in honest hands and run for itself. The trouble with Cary was that in order to keep control of the property he bought a lot of shares on margins, and when they began to run downhill, he was obliged to borrow money on his actual holdings to protect his fictitious ones. The stock went so low that he was wiped out. He wouldn’t take my advice earlier in the game; and I knew that it would only be losing money to lend it to him, later—still, sometimes I have been rather sorry I didn’t. Would I better try the spade, Bertie, or the diamond?”
The colonel advised the spade. He wondered whether he should repeat to his aunt the few sentences which he had overheard from Mercer and his companion; but a belief that old age worries easily, added to his natural man’s disinclination to attack the feminine nerves, tipped the scales against frankness. So, instead, he began to talk about Archie; what was he like? was he fond of athletics? or was he a bookish lad? Aunt Rebecca reported that he had liked riding and golf; but he was not very rugged, and since his father’sdeath he had seemed listless to a degree. “But he is better now,” she added with a trace of eagerness quite foreign to her usual manner. “Janet Smith has roused him up; and what do you suppose she has done? But really, you are the cause.”
“I?” queried the colonel.
“Just you. Archie, Janet argued, is the kind of nature that must have some one to be devoted to.”
“And has he taken a fancy to her? Or to you?”
Aunt Rebecca’s eyes dulled a little and her delicate lips were twisted by a smile which had more wistfulness than humor in it. “I’m not a lovable person; anyhow, he does not love easily. We are on terms of the highest respect, even admiration, but we haven’t got so far as friendship, far less comradeship. Janet is different. But I don’t mean Janet; she has grown absurdly fond of him; and I think he’s fond of her; but what she did was to make him fond of you. You, General Rupert Winter; why, that boy could pass an examination on your exploits and not miss a question. Janet and he have a scrap-book with every printed word about you, I do believe. And she has been amazingly shrewd. We didn’t know how to get the youngster back to his sports while he was out of school; and, in fact, an old woman like me israther bewildered by such a young creature, anyhow; but Janet rode with him;youare a remarkable rider; I helped there, because I remembered some anecdotes about you at West Point—”
“But, my dear Aunt—”
“Don’t interrupt, Bertie, it’s a distinctly American habit. And we read in the papers that you had learned that Japanese trick fighting—jiu-jitsu—and were a wonder—”
“I’m not, I assure you; that beast of a newspaper man—”
“Never mind, if you are not a wonder, you’ll have to be; you can take lessons in Los Angeles; there are quantities of Japs there. Why, even in Chicago, Janet picked up one, and we imported him, and Archie took lessons, and practises every day. There’s a book in my bag, in the rack there, a very interesting book; Janet and I have both read it so we could talk to Archie. You would better skim it over a little if you really aren’t an expert, enough so you cantalkjiu-jitsu, anyhow; we can’t be destroying Archie’s ideals until he gets a better appetite.”
“Well, upon my word!” breathed the colonel. “Do you expect me to be a fake hero? I never took more than two lessons in my life. That reporterinterviewed my teacher, who was killed in the Japanese War, by the way; he went to the army after my second lesson. He didn’t know any English beyond ‘yes’ and ‘if you please’; and he used them both on the reporter, who let his own fancy go up like a balloon. Well, where is the book?”
He found it easily; and with a couple of volumes of another kidney, over which he grinned.
“The Hound of the BaskervillesandThe Leavenworth Case! I’ve read them, too,” he said; “they’re great! And do you still like detective stories? You would have made a grand sleuth yourself, Aunt Becky.” Again he had half a mind to speak of the occurrence at the station; again he checked the impulse. “I remember,” he added, “that you used to hold strenuous opinions.”
“You mean my thinking that the reason crimes escape discovery is not that criminals are so bright, but that detectives in general are so particularly stupid? Oh, yes, I think that still. So does Sir Conan Doyle. And I have often wished I could measure my own wits, once, with a reallyfinecriminal intellect. It would be worth the risk.”
“God forbid!” said the colonel hastily.
There came a tap on the door.
“Millicent!” groaned Aunt Rebecca. “I know the creaking of her stays. No, don’t stay, Bertie; go and get Janet and a rescue bridge party as quick as you can!”
“The original and only Aunt Rebecca,” thought the colonel at the door, smiling. But, somehow, the handsome old dame never had seemed so nearly human to him before.