CHAPTER XVI
Jardine, after one moment of stultified amaze, felt as if the floor were sinking beneath his feet. In the sudden revulsion of his rage his head whirled, and he saw the room and the people go round and round in concentric circles. But for the chair he grasped he might have fallen. He was grateful that the interest produced by the announcement so superseded the surprise which his demonstration had occasioned that for a time he escaped notice, and was afforded an interval for the recovery of his composure.
"I am well acquainted in Glaston," one of the coterie observed. "I have never had the pleasure of meeting you there, Mr. Dalton, but I have often heard of you from my relatives, the Rickson family. Happy to make your acquaintance," and he offered his hand.
Some further informal introductions and atoning hand-shaking ensued with the discovery of mutual friends, all a trifle conscious and awkward, however, and there was a very general feeling of relief when Mrs. Laniston, perceiving the "lapse into barbarism," as she called it, at an end, broke into vivacious comments with her tactful perception of the least nettling phase of the disclosure.
"How perfectly delightful—such a romantic incident—an unexpected legacy—a windfall. But—since from the nature of the case it must be to a degree public—may I ask were not you two strangers when you met to-day in the stage?"
Mr. Dalton, in younger and slimmer years might have been an acceptable "ladies' man." He beamed with most responsive urbanity upon Mrs. Laniston, and was quite willing to permit a little harmless gossip to annul the impression of the violent methods by which the announcement had been elicited.
"I had not the most remote idea that he was the legatee. I had been looking for him—advertising in fact in every medium that I thought might meet his eye for the last four months. I heard by an accident that he was in Colbury as the manager of a little street fair."
There was a distinct sensation among the heavy-weights, financial and social, upon this mention. A sort of dismayed surprise usurped the genial satisfaction in more than one face in the coterie. Mr. Dalton seemed rather to rejoice in the effect he produced, to shatter thus their well-bred nerves. He looked around the circle, expansively smiling, before he went on: "When the train came in this morning I found that the Fair had collapsed, closed, and departed. Not disposed to a wild-goose chase I sent telegrams in every direction which I thought he might take. I concluded to await results, and preferred a sojourn at the Springs to the little town."
"The subtleties of the professional legal mind are past fathoming, I know," said Mrs. Laniston. "But I cannot understand by what keen insight, by what unclassified faculty of discrimination you could say to yourself as you toiled up the mountain beside an absolute stranger 'Thisis the legatee I am hunting for.' Why, among your fellow-travellers, did you select this Mr. Lloyd, instead of Mr. Jardine or my son Francis Laniston?"
Mr. Dalton twinkled appreciatively as he listened to this. "I have a mind to appropriate those compliments, madam—you have doubtless heard that the profession is not overscrupulous in taking advantage of a concession. But the fact is that the young gentleman's extraordinary personal appearance first gave me a clue to his identity. His mother took a fifteen thousand dollar prize in an international beauty show."
"Oh," ejaculated Mrs. Laniston, fairly taken aback. She had had it vaguely in her mind that the manager was not really what he seemed, and was about to protest that she had had the discrimination to discern this from the first, inquiring who was "that distinguished-looking young gentleman."
Mr. Jardine had thrown himself into the rocking-chair on which he had been leaning, feeling that he had done all that he could, more than his unfounded suspicions justified, and seeking to recover himself of his excitement and nervous strain. At this disclosure of the showman's antecedents he raised his eyebrows in sarcastic disdain. After all the Lanistons were free agents, and if they deliberately chose association of this type—why, they were not for him nor he for them.
Mrs. Laniston vaguely lifted her eyes to the window opening on the verandah; to see Jardine not in attendance on Lucia gave her an unwonted sense of something awry, but the next moment the interest of the gossip annulled this impression, and she was listening to Mr. Dalton, who, having exhausted his relish of the survey of the flinching group, went on with animation.
"And she was as good as she was pretty—which is saying a very great deal! She provided for her aged parents permanently out of her prize money, sent a consumptive brother to a hospital where he was cured, to be drowned afterward on an ocean voyage. I fancy she bought much fine dry goods and frippery; in effect she distributed the sum in a year or so, contentedly relying on her slender salary as a dancer—they tell me that despite her beauty and grace she was an indifferent dancer—till she met this young fellow's father, who straightway married her."
Mr. Dalton had reached the limit of his capacity it would seem to sustain the public interest. So genteel a circle was not entertained by a biography of this sordid character. The bridge party, albeit with a civil effect of listening, had begun to play out the interrupted hand, though the owner of the dummy sat sideways in his chair and still turned an attentive face. Mrs. Laniston, fluttering the leaves of her magazine, was vaguely disconcerted. She could hardly be said to have her two charges in mind in this connection—she had no reason to think that the young showman would presume to speak to either of them. Jardine, a contemptuous satiric smile on his jaded face, sat languidly listening.
Mr. Dalton, perhaps, had already found a field at the Bar for his gift of marshalling facts, approaching with an ever-increasing velocity of significance the climax, but a chancellor, or apuisnejudge, or even a jury was better fitted to resist the shock of sudden surprise than the idle summer birds in their relaxed mental attitude.
"Now," he continued, "the father was of a different sort; he was a young man of the very highest social connections. Moreover, he was talented, well-behaved, studious, very young—only in his junior year at college—heart-rending infatuation. His family investigated the facts and when they found that the marriage was really valid they cast him off without a moment's hesitation, absolutely, irretrievably. I never shall forget Judge Lloyd's dismay——"
"Judge Lloyd?" exclaimed several voices in different keys of sharp surprise.
"You surely don't mean Judge Clarence Jennico Lloyd of Glaston?" said the gentleman who had connections in that city, and was familiar with the status of its principal people.
"The noted jurist?—I do! He was considered a hard man, but he was a very just one. This happened in his palmy days, when he was very rich as well as esteemed far and wide an ornament to the judiciary. The family could trace a long and proud descent and they carried their heads very high. The judge could not tolerate such a mésalliance. He persisted in considering the woman a designing baggage and tried to buy her off. He bid very high—that was before his financial reverses."
Mr. Dalton swayed his big head to and fro, his eyes alight with the fires of reminiscence as the scenes of nearly thirty years earlier were re-enacted in his memory. "And yet from his standpoint he was quite right. They were very strict religionists, those Lloyds—Methodists, or Campbellites, or what not—they thought it a mortal sin to attend even a Shakespearean performance at a theatre. Judge Lloyd did not know one card from another—and was proud of the fact. I remember that once I tried a case in his court that involved a gambling transaction—his cousin Charles Jennico was of the opposing counsel—but that's neither here nor there. Judge Lloyd had other children then—boys and girls—he could not bring them into such association—he could not justify such an example."
"Jennico—isn't that a name down your way, in Louisiana, Mrs. Laniston?" one of the chess players suggested.
"I was just thinking," said Mrs. Laniston, her surprised eyes on the fire, her thin, jewelled fingers still keeping her place in the magazine. "There is an inconsiderable plantation called the Jennico place just beyond the bight of the bayou. The proprietor never lived there. I always understood that the owner was wealthy—but it is much neglected and in need of repair."
"It belongs to this fellow now," said the lawyer comfortably. "What sort of a house is on it, do you know, madam?"
"Not much of a house—a six-room frame, I think—there is not much land, but it is of good quality."
The lawyer, identified with his client's interests, nodded his head, smiling as if in personal gratification.
"I have some curiosity, Mr. Dalton," said one of the chess players, a soul dedicated to problems, "to know how such an unexpected windfall would affect a man. How did the young fellow receive the news of his good fortune?"
"Almost stunned at first—dreadfully taken aback;" the lawyer laughed and then grew grave.
"He had some points besides the money interests to claim his attention, you see. Thedanseuseand her highly bred and refined husband had very hard luck. Her earnings were poor, and he could not get employment in any appropriate way on account of the impression which his marriage gave to people of position. He was naturally supposed to be such a man who would make such a marriage. He tried all sorts of things, unsuited to his training and traditions. He was a ticket-taker, an advance agent, doorkeeper—had a classical education and wrote theatrical advertisements and puffs for newspapers—had no conception of the dramatic afflatus, wrote a play or two, heavy as lead, warranted to fall flat. He succumbed to ill-health, and then his father, having lost several children—all but this one and the eldest, Robert—and being much softened, offered to take this son back, excluding the wife of course, but paying her a handsome pension; this was refused. Time went on; the situation waxed worse continually; the judge then offered financial assistance unconditionally. But it came too late; the son died—presently his wife died also, and the grandson, then almost grown, doing a 'ground-and-lofty-tumbling turn' in great glory in a circus company went his way, chiefly on his head. He was lost sight of for a time, for Robert Lloyd, an admirable man and considered to have excellent business judgment, having made several most fortunate speculations, went beyond his depth, was caught in the undertow and dragged to ruin, overwhelming with him Judge Lloyd himself—I never could understand the tangle of Robert Lloyd's affairs. In the confusion of the financial wreck no one remembered this boy—the friends of the family thought the outcome well enough. The boy in his risky vocation must soon break his neck; and thus the unlucky episode of the beauty-prize winner in the Lloyd family would be definitely terminated. But, luckily enough it proved, the old gentleman once saw this grandson. Have you met him—this young fellow?" he broke off suddenly, addressing one of the chess players.
"No, I have not," the gentleman responded a trifle stiffly—street fairs were not in his line.
Mr. Dalton smiled benignly. "The most winning personality—yet with a quiet inherent dignity all his own, the most disarming amiability—and a face that you might wander through a hundred exhibitions of painting and never see equalled for a certain sort of charm. I don't wonder at the award for the fifteen thousand dollar prize—ha, ha, ha!"
"What is it that the court says when counsel becomes prolix—Be brief, sir—be brief," suggested Mrs. Laniston, laughing nervously. She was surprised to find herself eager, expectant. "Your story is too interesting to bear digressions, Mr. Dalton."
"Thanks—thanks greatly," Mr. Dalton beamed.
"Well, the circus roaming around the country gave an exhibition in the neighbourhood of Charles Jennico's summer residence near Glaston, where Judge Lloyd was visiting. He and Jennico were first cousins, and after his financial reverses the judge, who was as proud as Lucifer, scarcely went anywhere else. And this youngster, a man grown he was then, had the hardihood, or the good feeling, or the curiosity—or nobody knows what actuated him—to deliberately call on the old man. 'I don't want a thing in the world of you,' he said. 'But I know that my father owed you much, and I owe you much for what my father was to me. I came to pay my respects—to get the glad hand, that's all.' Judge Lloyd never opened his lips to me on the subject of this visit, but he was taken by surprise, the young man being ushered into the library, and Charles Jennico was sitting in the bay-window—he used to laugh and cry together when he rehearsed the scene. The judge, he said, was like a man in a dream at first. Then he began to beseech this stranger to come and live with him like a son without conditions and without restraint. 'But I could not become a dependent on you,' the boy said. 'It would be like a robbery of your old age. I have heard of your financial reverses or I would not have come. I know that you are broke.' And though he put it thus bluntly the judge did not wither him with a look. He said that he had influence—without depriving himself he could provide the youngster with respectable employment. 'You have no idea of my ignorance, grandfather. What you call respectable employment for me would have either to be a farce or a gratuity. I can do real work, such as it is, where I am and eat my own bread.' Judge Lloyd argued that he could secure money for his education. He had friends who would be glad to oblige him. 'It would go hard with you to ask a favour for yourself, sir—you shall not sue for me.' The old gentleman then urged him to consider what he would lose—he should have every advantage, he should travel. 'Grandfather,' he said, 'I have stood on my head in every capital of Europe—what I should be tempted to do would be to stay with you, quiet, resting, for I am fed up with stir and racket.' The whole thing captured Charles Jennico's fancy. He said that he had never expected to hear Judge Lloyd come so near a confession of arbitrary injustice, as when he said how cruel had been the past, and how he feared that he had allowed a subservience to artificial standards to embitter and impoverish and shorten the lives of the youth's parents. 'You were just and true from your standpoint,' the boy sought to comfort him. 'A father has arightto his son's obedience'—the old judge used to repeat this phrase; it justified his course to himself. 'And yet my father was right, too, from his standpoint—I can't judge between you. I don't blame either for what is gone. I would willingly live with you in my father's place, but I must make and eat my own bread and play the man. You made a great mistake about my mother, though—you never knew my mother. She was It! She was the whole team! She was the Pearl you threw away, worth all your tribe!' And Judge Lloyd said that he believed it now that he had seen her son—he wished he had seen her first. And then the two, as competent fools as ever lived, fell on each other's necks and wept and parted."
"Tut, tut, tut—what a pity," said the bald-headed bridge player, oblivious of the words of his partner until she twice repeated, "Shall I lead, partner," when he caught himself with a galvanic start and responded, "Pray do."
There was a pause while Mr. Dalton eyed the fire reflectively, puffing at his cigar, which had gone out while he talked, requiring to be rekindled.
"What so won upon me this afternoon was the manner in which young Lloyd received the intelligence. He did not seem to remember or care at first that his financial miseries were now at an end—although he has been at his wit's end for money as he told me afterward; in fact, that he had not enough to pay for his transportation with the rest of the troupe or show or carnival or whatever the organisation is called, and had even tried to pawn his mother's engagement ring which had been indeed his grandmother's engagement ring—an heirloom in Judge Lloyd's family, a thing with a legend, more or less mythical, I suppose."
Jardine thought of the gems he had seen in the safe of the hotel in Colbury, but he kept his own counsel.
"Of course the detail of the circumstances brought back to him that day of parting, and he told me that when he had first heard of his grandfather's death without another word between them he had deeply regretted his refusal to live with him in his father's place. He thought he had been too sensitive as to his independence—too afraid of grafting. It would not have been for long. He could have been the solace of the old gentleman's reverses and his age. He was wild that he had denied him aught—the only time that they had ever seen each other! His grandfather had been good to him that day, he said. And there," said Mr. Dalton with a whimsical wave of his cigar, "I had to wait and postpone the details of business communications while he leaned up against a tree in the woods and sobbed like a child because his grandfather had been good to him that day when he had offered him—so late—the boon of a life of precarious dependence in lieu of his free agency and a certain means of livelihood. I was touched, I must confess, I was very much touched. He has a rare nature, this-ground-and-lofty tumbler."
Mr. Dalton had not observed the usual legal reticence concerning a client's affairs. The nature of the case, the will and other matters of record, would give publicity to the mere facts, but he was solicitous, since the details had of necessity been elicited here, that the personal character of the harlequin legatee should be put into evidence, and receive from all the respect which he felt to be its due. No better method could he have found to disseminate the impression he wished to create than these reminiscences addressed to a symposium of idle gossips. Their craftily titillated interest kept them still loitering around the fire after the card and chess tables had been abandoned as the hour wore late, and when Mrs. Laniston began to ascend the stairs to her apartment she noted, glancing back from the landing, that a group of gentlemen with freshly lighted cigars were drawing closer round the hearth continuing the subject with its cognate themes.
She had so unusually prolonged her loitering about the office fire to-night that she found that her son and daughter had returned from their mild diversions with the other youth of the place and were awaiting her coming in her room.
Frank was busy with some boxing gloves and was directing with a very exacting air precisely how some stitches should be set in the puffy awkward bags which had somehow become ripped. His sister Ruth, with her thimble and waxed thread, had placed the kerosene lamp and her workbox on the little table and was patiently repairing the damages according to his directions to the best of her ability.
"Ruthie, how close you do put your head to the lamp-chimney," her mother exclaimed in irritable warning. "Do be more careful, child. In another moment you would have singed your pompadour. Where is Lucia?"
Ruth lifted the endangered rouleau, stared around a moment, as if she expected to see her cousin here. "Why, she came upstairs with me—" then suggesting, "She must be in our room, I reckon," went on with her work as before.
Mrs. Laniston, proceeding into the adjoining apartment, found that it was not lighted, save by the moon, pouring the white rays through the windows, the shades being still up, and the shutters open. Outside was the limitless wilderness of the mountains, purple and dusky against the light indeterminate blue of the sky. A few stars, large and whitely lustrous, scintillated at vast intervals, but the moon was supreme, and the white mists in the valleys shimmered with opalescent suggestions of delicate tints. Far away the sudden shrill snarling cry of a catamount smote the air, then all was silent save the rush of the torrent in the valley. For a moment it seemed that no one was in the room; then Mrs. Laniston perceived that Lucia was seated, half kneeling, close by the window, very still, very silent, and she was sure that the girl had been weeping.
"Want anything?" asked Lucia, in a voice that yet betrayed tears; then she put her elbows on the window sill and more deliberately addressed herself to the contemplation apparently of the night.
"Lucia—chilly as it is! What are you doing at that window? You'll catch your death of cold."
Lucia in a muffled voice muttered something about the air being quite balmy, and remarked that she had been already most of the evening promenading on the verandah.
"Why," said Mrs. Laniston, stolidly amazed, "Mr. Jardine was in the office the whole time."
"We are not the Siamese twins," said Lucia dully.
"Of course not. Who were you with, most of the time?"
For there still remained at New Helvetia a number of squires of dames, eminently available for germans, and verandah promenades, and sentimentalisings in the moonlight.
"I was with Mr. Lloyd, all the time." Her voice quavered as she anticipated the note of surprise, and reprehension, and dismay in Mrs. Laniston's rejoinder. It sounded instantly.
"Why, Lucia! That showman, Lloyd?"
"I could not very well avoid it—and I didn't want to avoid it," she said rather doggedly.
Mrs. Laniston had a monition of George Laniston's ultra particularity in social matters; then she had a saving recollection of the standing of Judge Lloyd.
"Oh, poor fellow! I suppose he wanted to boast a bit of his legacy. It seems he comes of good people on his father's side, and has been remembered in a codicil, or something."
"He did not mention the legacy, except that he did say as it would make his connections a matter of newspaper notoriety he did not mind speaking of them. He said he would not do this ordinarily, for in a man in his humble business it would seem boastful, and he declared that he was more proud of his mother, and her generosity, and her struggles, and her courage, and her life of sacrifice in the care of those dear to her, than of every Lloyd that ever stepped."
And the proud Miss Laniston burst into tears—not the first she had shed that night over the pathos of the ci-devant dancer's woes.
"Why, Lucia," Mrs. Laniston exclaimed, irritably, "I am surprised that you should be so weak."
Lucia had no desire to be strong; she continued to weep without reserve.
"She was lovely—lovely; I can see it through all he says of her, and how bitterly she blamed herself to be the cause of her husband's and son's abandonment by their fine relations. She would have been willing to give them up, to go off anywhere, in any poverty, so they might have the position, and luxuries, and advantages of the station to which they were born. But they clung to each other and to her, as anybody might know they would!"
And once more the hot tears came.
There was a moment's silence in which Mrs. Laniston canvassed this unprecedented difficulty.
"And now he reproaches himself that afterward he did not go to his grandfather. He is wild about it. He says his grandfather was right from his standpoint, and he was old and forlorn, and yearned for the arm of his son's son to lean upon. He is stricken with remorse, and he has no peace. No—he didn't talk at all about the legacy."
Mrs. Laniston gathered her forces for a desperatecoup.
"Lucia Laniston, listen to me. You are not falling in love with that man, for of course you couldn't consider so ignorant a person, with so frightful an accent and choice of phrases. But you are allowing your imagination to become involved."
"Oh, no, Aunt Dora," Lucia murmured. But Mrs. Laniston kept on.
"It is not becoming for you to sit here on the floor in that nice dress—and there is no earthly process by which those delicate fabrics can be cleaned—and weep your eyes out about a stranger's mother. No matter how lovely—and she took an international prize for beauty—she was a circus girl, or a ballet dancer, a position that in itself it is impossible to ignore or forget, no matter what he or anyone else may say. I am glad, since his father was one of Judge Lloyd's sons, that he is to be redeemed from that awful calling; it seems that he will own that small Jennico plantation near us in Louisiana, and the little six-room frame house on it. I suppose he will farm there, and maybe some people will receive him on sufferance—such an uneducated man, my dear! Of course I know if he were really rich he could go where he pleases, and the best society would pull caps for him, and he could marry whom he chooses. Don't think I am sordid, dear.Idon't make these conventions. They are the inexorable law of the world. But consider, my dear, what—once in New Orleans, or St. Simon's Island, or Jacksonville—you would think of such a cavalier. You know I have never been hateful and stiff with you and Ruth. I have let you have all the good time you could with propriety. I think this young fellow's prize-beauty makes him very fetching, and his 'lydy,' isn't the awful address it would be on any other tongue; and his suddenly inheriting a bit of money is like a romance. But life is made up of commonplaces and realities, dear, and a girl who lets herself dream in the moonlight must wake at least to a very sordid day. Your papa wouldn't forgive me if I didn't warn you, dear. Love must be founded on respect; a man must be in a position for a woman to look up to him, to defer to his experience and judgment, and superior information and education. A woman cannot lead a husband by the hand."
"You take too much for granted, Aunt Dora," Lucia interrupted, a trifle angrily.
"A man with a past like his would reveal a thousand amazing tastes and prejudices and views, the like of which you never heard. You would spend your life in teaching, and combating, and obliterating. And the little six-room frame—seems to me it has a little garden in front, with turfed flower beds, raised in stars, and hearts, and triangles. If cotton doesn't pick up somehow you can't expect much from your father till his death—I hope for your sake, as well as his, that's a long way off. He is a young man, comparatively; he may marry again. I want you to make a comfortable match, and be easy and happy. Ruth's prospects are so good in her engagement to Philip Trumbull—I wish I could make her write more regularly to that man—she is so idle!—and I couldn't bear for you to be less appropriately placed."
"I haven't asked him to marry me, Aunt Dora," Lucia said suddenly in her natural manner, "and I can assure you that he has not made the slightest intimation tending that way."
"Well, so far, so good! Get up off the floor—that stuff pulls so, and just see how your knee is straining it. What a moonlight night!" she exclaimed, rising and standing before the window. "What a mystery on the mountains!"