Read Ebook: Light-Fingered Gentry by Phillips David Graham Brehm George Illustrator

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Ebook has 2270 lines and 129679 words, and 46 pages

"I haven't spoken to them about it. Why should I? Are not our relations a matter between ourselves alone? Who else could understand? Who could advise?"

"What you propose is a very grave matter."

Again her secret smile, this time a gleam of irony in it. "You do not wish to be free?"

His expression showed how deeply he instantly became alarmed. She smiled openly. "Don't pretend to yourself that you are concerned about my interests," she said; "frankness to-day--please."

"I'm afraid you don't realize what you are doing," he felt compelled to insist. "And that is honest."

"You don't understand me. You never did. You never could, so long as I am your wife. That's the way it is in marriage--if people begin wrong, as we did. But, at least, believe me when I say I've thought it all out--in these years of long, long days and weeks and months when I've had no business to distract me."

"You are right," he said. "We have never been of the slightest use to each other. We are utterly out of sympathy--like strangers."

"Worse," she replied. "Strangers may come together, but not the husband and wife whose interest in each other has been killed." She gazed long out over the lake toward the mist-veiled Wabash range before adding, almost under her breath, "Or never was born."

"I have a naturally expansive temperament," he went on, as if in her train of thought. "I need friendship, affection. You are by nature reserved and cold."

She smiled enigmatically. "I doubt if you know me well enough to judge."

"At least, you've been cold and reserved with me--always, from the very beginning."

"It would be a strange sort of woman, don't you think, who would not be chilled by a man who regarded everyone as a mere rung in his ladder--first for the hand, then for the foot? Oh, I'm not criticising. I understand and accept many things I was once foolishly sensitive about. I see your point of view. You feel you must get rid of whatever interferes with your development. And you are right. We must be true to ourselves. Worn-out clothes, worn-out friends, worn-out ties of every kind--all must go to the rag bag--relentlessly."

He did not like it that she said these things so placidly and without the least bitterness. He admitted they were true; but her wisdom jarred upon him as "unwomanly," as further proof of the essential coldness of her nature; he would have accepted as natural and proper the most unreasonable and most intemperate reproaches and denunciations. He hardened his heart and returned to the main question. "Then you really wish to be free?" He liked to utter that last word, to drink in the clarion sound of it.

"For the lawyers. We need not discuss them. Besides, they are few and simple. I give you your freedom; I receive mine--and that is all. I shall take my own name. And we can both begin again."

He was looking at her now; for the first time in their acquaintance he was beginning to wonder whether he had not been mistaken in assigning her to that background of neutral-colored masses against which the few with positive personalities play the drama of life. As he sat silent, confused, she still further amazed him by rising and extending her hand. "Good-by," she said. "You'll take the four-fifty train back to Chicago?"

It seemed to him they were not parting as should two who had been so long and, in a sense, so intimately, each in the other's life and thought. Yet, what was there to be said or done? He rose, hesitated, awkwardly touched her insistent hand, reluctantly released it. "Good-by," he stammered. He had an uncomfortable sense of being dismissed--and who likes summarily to be dismissed, even by one of whose company he is least glad?

Suddenly, upon a wave of color the beauty that nature had all but given her, swept, triumphant and glorious, into her face, into her figure. It was as startling, as vivid, as dazzling as the fair, far-stretching landscape the lightning flash conjures upon the black curtain of night. While he was staring in dazed amazement, the apparition vanished with the wave of emotion that had brought it into view.

Before he could decide whether he had seen or had only imagined, she was gone, was making her way up the path alone. A sudden melancholy shadowed him--the melancholy of the closed chapter, of the thing that has been and shall not be again, forever. But the exhilarating fact of freedom soon dissipated this thin shadow. With shoulders erect and firm, and confident gait he strode toward the station, his mind gone ahead of him to Chicago, to New York, to his future, his career, his conquest of power. An hour after his train left Battle Field, Neva Carlin was to Horace Armstrong simply a memory, a filed document to be left undisturbed under its mantle of dust.

"There'll be about six hundred of us," Fosdick had said. "Do your best, and send in the bill."

And the best it certainly was, even for New York with its profuse ideas as to dispensing the rivers of other people's money that flood in upon it from the whole country. The big banquet hall was walled with flowers; there were great towering palms rising from among the tables and so close together that their leaves intermingled in a roof. Each table was an attempt at a work of art; the table of honor was strewn and festooned with orchids at a dollar and a half apiece; there was music, of course, and it the costliest; there were souvenirs--they alone absorbed upward of ten thousand dollars. As for the dinner itself, the markets of the East and the South and of the Pacific Coast had been searched; the fish had come from France; the fruit from English hothouses; four kinds of wine, but those who preferred it could have champagne straight through. The cigars cost a dollar apiece, the boutonni?res another dollar, the cigarettes were as expensive as are the cigars of many men who are particular as to their tobacco. Lucullus may have spent more on some of his banquets, but he could have got no such results. In fact, it was a "seventy-five a plate" dinner, though Fosdick was not boasting it, as he would have liked; he was mindful of the recent exposures of the prodigality of managers of corporations with the investments of "the widow and the orphan and the thrifty poor."

Fosdick, presiding, with Shotwell on his right and Armstrong on his left, swelled with pride in his own generosity and taste as he gazed round. True, the O.A.D. was to pay the bill; true, he had known nothing about the arrangements for the banquet until he came to preside at it. But was he not the enchanter who evoked it all? He hadn't a doubt that his was the glory, all the glory--just as, when he bought for a large sum a picture with a famous name to it, he showed himself to be greater than the painter. He prided himself upon his good taste--did he not select the man who selected the costly things for him; did he not sign the checks? But most of all he prided himself on his big heart. He loved to give--to his children, to his friends, to servants--not high wages indeed, for that would have been bad business, but tips and presents which made a dazzling showing and flooded his heart with the warm milk of human kindness, whereas a small increase of wages would be insignificant, without pleasurable sensation, and a permanent drain. Of all the men who devote their lives to what some people call finance--and others call reaping where another has sown--he was the most generous. "A great, big, beating human heart," was what you heard about Fosdick everywhere. "A hard, wily fighter in finance, but a man full of red blood, for all that."

Having surveyed the magic scene his necromancy and his generosity had created, he shifted his glance patronizingly to the man at his right--the man for whom he had done this generous act, the retiring president of the O.A.D., to whom this dinner was a testimonial. As Fosdick looked at Shotwell, his face darkened. "The damned old ingrate," he muttered. "He doesn't appreciate what I've done for him." And there was no denying it. The old man was looking a sickly, forlorn seventy-five, at least, though he was only sixty-five, only two years older than Fosdick. He was humped down in a sort of stupor, his big flat chin on his crushed shirt bosom, his feeble, age-mottled hand fumbling with his napkin, with his wineglass, with the knives, forks, and spoons.

"The boys are giving you a great send off," said Fosdick. As Shotwell knew who alone was responsible for the "magnificent and touching testimonial," Fosdick risked nothing in this modesty.

Shotwell, startled, wiped his mouth with his napkin.

"Yes, yes," he said; "it's very nice."

Nice! And if Fosdick had chosen he could have had Shotwell flung down and out in disgrace from the exalted presidency of the O.A.D., instead of retiring him thus gloriously. Nice! Fosdick almost wished he had--almost. He would have quite wished it, if retiring Shotwell in disgrace would not have injured the great company, so absolutely dependent upon popular confidence. Nice! Fosdick turned away in disgust. He remembered how, when he had closed his trap upon Shotwell--a superb stroke of business, that!--not a soul had suspected until the jaws snapped and the O.A.D. was his--he remembered how Shotwell had met his demand for immediate resignation or immediate disgrace, with shrieks of hate and cursing. "I suppose he can't get over it," reflected Fosdick. "Men blind themselves completely to the truth where vanity and self-interest are concerned. He probably still hates me, and can't see that I was foolishly generous with him. Where's there another man in the financial district who'd have allowed him a pension of half his salary for life?"

But such thoughts as these in this hour for expansion and good will marred his enjoyment. Fosdick turned to the man at his left, to young Armstrong, whom he was generously lifting to the lofty seat from which he had so forbearingly ejected the man at his right. Armstrong--a huge, big fellow with one of those large heads which show unmistakably that they are of the rare kind of large head that holds a large brain--was as abstracted as Shotwell. The food, the wine before him, were untouched. He was staring into his plate, with now and then a pull at his cropped, fair mustache or a passing of his large, ruddy, well-shaped hand over his fine brow. "What's the matter, Horace?" said Fosdick; "chewing over the speech?"

Armstrong straightened himself with a smile that gave his face instantly the look of frankness and of high, dauntless spirit. "No, I've got that down--and mighty short it is," said he; "the fewer words I say now, the fewer there'll be to rise up and mock me, if I fail."

Armstrong looked uncomfortable rather than relieved. "They've elected me president," said he, and his quiet tone had the energy of an inflexible will. "I intend to be president. No one can save me if I haven't it in me to win out."

Fosdick frowned, and pursed his lips until his harsh gray mustache bristled. "Symptoms of swollen head already," was his irritated inward comment. "He's been in the job forty-eight hours, and he's ready to forget who made him. But I'll soon remind him that I could put him where I got him--and further down, damn him!"

"Some one is signaling you from the box straight ahead," said Armstrong. "I think it's your daughter."

As the young woman was plainly visible and as Armstrong knew her well, this caution of statement could not have been quite sincere. But Fosdick did not note it; he was bowing and smiling at the occupants of that most conspicuous box. At the table of honor to the right and left of him were the directors of the O.A.D., the most representative of the leading citizens of New York; they owned, so it was said, one fifteenth and directly controlled about one half of the entire wealth of the country; not a blade was harvested, not a wheel was turned, not a pound of freight was lifted from Maine to the Pacific but that they directly or indirectly got a "rake off"--or, if you prefer, a commission for graciously permitting the work to be done. In the horseshoe of boxes, overlooking the banquet, were the families of these high mightinesses, the wives and daughters and sons who gave the mightiness outward and visible expression in gorgeous display and in painstaking reproduction of the faded old aristocracies of birth beyond the Atlantic.

Fosdick had insisted on this demonstration because the banquet was to be not only a testimonial to Shotwell, but also a formal installation of himself and his daughter and son in the high society of the plutocracy. Fosdick had long had power downtown; but he had lacked respectability. Not that his reputation was not good; on the contrary, it was spotless--as honest as generous, as honorable as honest. Respectability, however, has nothing to do with honesty, whether reputed or real. It is a robe, an entitlement, a badge; it comes from associating with the respectable, uptown as well as down. Fosdick, grasping this fact, after twenty years' residence in New York in ignorance of it, had forthwith resolved to be respectable, to change the dubious social status of his family into a structure as firm and as imposing as his fortune. His business associates had imagined themselves free, uptown at least, from his vast and ever vaster power; at one stroke he showed them the fatuous futility of their social coldness, of their carefully drawn line between doing business with him and being socially intimate with him, made it amusingly apparent that their condescensions to his daughter and son in the matter of occasional invitations were as flimsily based as were their elaborate pretenses of superior birth and breeding. He invited them to make a social function of this business dinner; he made each recipient of an invitation personally feel that it was wise to accept, dangerous to refuse. The hope of making money and the dread of losing it have ever been the two all-powerful considerations in an aristocracy of any kind. Respectability and fashion "accepted."

So, Fosdick, looking across that resplendent scene, at the radiant faces of his daughter and son, felt the light and the warmth driving away the shadows of Shotwell's ingratitude and Armstrong's lack of deference. But just as he was expanding to the full girth of his big heart, he chilled and shrunk again. There, beside his daughter, sat old Shotwell's wife. She was as cold as so much marble; the diamonds on her great white shoulders and bosom seemed to give off a chill from their light. She was there, it is true; but like a dethroned queen in the triumphal procession of an upstart conqueror. She was a rebuke, a damper, a spoiler of the feast. She never had cared for old Shotwell; she had married him because he was the best available catch and could give her everything she wanted, everything she could conceive a woman's wanting. She had tolerated him as one of the disagreeable but necessary incidents of the journey of life. But Shotwell's downfall was hers, was their children's. It meant a lower rank in the social hierarchy; it meant that she and hers must bow before this "nobody from nowhere" and his children. She sat there, beside Amy, in front of Hugo, the embodiment of icy hate.

"This damn dinner is entirely too long," muttered Fosdick, though he did not directly connect his dissatisfaction with the cold stare from Shotwell's wife.

But Mrs. Shotwell was not interfering with the enjoyment of Amy and Hugo.

If Fosdick had planned with an inquisitor's cunning to put her to the most exquisite torture, he could not have been more successful. From his box she had the best possible view of the whole scene; and, while Shotwell had told her only the smallest part of the truth about his "resignation," she had read the newspaper reports of the investigation of the O.A.D. which had preceded his downfall, and, though that investigation had changed from an attack on him to an exoneration, after he yielded to Fosdick, she had guessed enough of the truth to know that this "testimonial" to him was in fact a testimonial to Fosdick.

Hugo and Amy, the children of a rich man and unmarried, had long been popular with all the women who had unmarried sons and daughters; this evening they roused enthusiasm. Everybody who hoped to make, or feared to lose, money was impressed by their charms. Amy, who was pretty, was declared beautiful; Hugo, who looked as if he had brains, though in fact he had not, was pronounced a marvel of serious intellectuality. The young men flocked round Amy; Hugo's tour of the boxes was an ovation. To an observant outsider, looking beneath surfaces to realities, the scene would have been ludicrous and pitiful; to those taking part, it seemed elegant, kindly, charming. Mrs. Shotwell was almost at the viewpoint of the outsider--not the philosopher, but he who stands hungry and thirsty in the cold and glowers through the window at the revelers and denounces them for their selfish gluttony. And by the way of chagrin and envy she reached the philosopher's conclusion. "How coarse and low!" she thought. "New York gets more vulgar every year."

Amy, accustomed all her life to have anything and everything she wanted, had been dissatisfied about the family's social position and eager to improve it; but the instant she realized they were at last "in the push," securely there, she began to lose interest; after an hour of the new adulation, she had enough, was looking impatiently round for something else to want and to strive for.

Not so Hugo. Society had seemed a serious matter to him from his earliest days at college, when he began to try to get into the fashionable fraternities, and failed. He had been invited wherever any marriageable girls were on exhibition; but he had noted, and had taken it quickly to heart, that he was not often invited when such offerings were not being made. He had gone heavily into a flirtation with a young married woman, as dull as himself. It was in vain; she had invited him, but her friends had not, unless she was to be there to take care of him. He had attributed this in part to his father, in part to his married sister--his father, who made occasional slips in grammar and was boisterous and dictatorial in conversation; his sister, whose husband kept a big retail furniture store and "looks the counter-jumper that he is," Hugo often said to Amy in their daily discussions of their social woes. Now, all this worriment was over; Hugo, touring the boxes, felt he had reached the summit of ambition. And it seemed to him he had himself brought it about--his diplomatic assiduity in cultivating "the right people," the steady, if gradual, permeation of his physical and mental charms.

Amy sent a note down to Armstrong, asking him to come to the box a moment. As he entered, Hugo was just leaving on another excursion for further whiffs of the incense that was making him visibly as drunk, if in a slightly different way, as the younger and obscurer members of the staff of the O.A.D. downstairs. At sight of Armstrong he put out his hand graciously and said: "Ah--Horace--howdy?" in a tone that made it difficult for Armstrong to refrain from laughing in his face.

"All right, Hugo," said he.

Hugo frowned. For him to address one of his father's employees by his first name was natural and proper and a mark of distinguished favor; for one of those employees to retort in kind was a gross impertinence. He did not see just how to show his indignation, just how to set the impudent employee back in his place. He put the problem aside for further thought, and brushed haughtily by Armstrong, who, however, had already forgotten him.

"Just let Mr. Armstrong sit there, won't you?" said Amy to the young man in the seat immediately behind hers.

The young man flushed; she had cut him off in the middle of a sentence which was in the middle of the climax of what he thought a most amusing story. He gave place to Armstrong, hating him, since hatred of an heiress was not to be thought of.

"What is it you want so particularly to see me about?" Armstrong said to her.

She smiled with radiant coquetry. "Nothing at all," she replied. "I put that in the note simply to make sure you'd come."

Armstrong laughed. "You're a spoiled one," said he. And he got up, nodded friendlily to her, bowed to her Arctic chaperon and departed, she so astonished that she could think of nothing to say to detain him.

Soon her father was standing, was rapping for order. Handsome and distinguished, with his keen face and tall lean figure, his iron-gray hair and mustache, he spoke out like one who has something to say and will be heard:

"Let us rise, gentlemen, and drink to our honored, our honorable chief!"

The banqueters sprang to their feet, lifting their glasses high. Old Shotwell, his face like wax, rose feebly, stared into vacancy, passed one tremulous hand over the big, flat, weak chin, sunk into his chair again. Some one shouted, "Three cheers for Shotwell!" Floor and boxes stood and cheered, with much waving of napkins and handkerchiefs and clinking of glasses. It was a thrilling scene, the exuberant homage of affairs to virtue.

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