First harvests

THE autumn winds began; winds that in the country bring red leaves, and ripening nuts, and smells of cider, and the crisp white frost; and in the city come with clouds of pungent dust of streets, and sticks and straws, and make one’s daily walk and ride a nuisance, not a pleasure. But all the world, or all the world that Arthur saw, was busied with its dresses and with its future entertainments, and with rejoicings over future marriages, and, now and here, perhaps, regrets, and longer days for women, and sterner work for men. For the beauty of our modern view of life is that it bids no man be content who stays in that position where our simple fathers used to say a wise providence had placed him. Not even our primers have this lesson now; but tell us, with A who is the architect of his own fortunes, how we all may rise in life. We are brought to make light of lessons, too—all lessons, from the first and second down—and the small boy has formed the taste of the nation and dictates its likings not only on the fourth of July; let us have our fun, and jest at all the school-marms and the moral tales. For the school-room’s mimic can make faces long years before the first scholar understands. Terrible indeed must have been the elders of a generation ago, that we kick our heels so high at having gotten loose from them.

So the race of life began again; and Charlie Townley on the home stretch, but laboring heavily. Old Mr. Townley came to the office seldomer than ever, this year; but Tamms was there, as regular as the clockwork beat upon a bomb of dynamite. His wiry red mustache was bitten close above his upper lip, and his discreet eyelids more inflamed than ever. And Charlie knew that all their Allegheny Central stock was still held in the office; and the strike seemed no nearer to a settlement than ever. “These labor troubles have played the devil with the market,” he would say to Charlie; “and public confidence is entirely lost.” Tamms depended much on public confidence. And Deacon Remington’s brokers would go into the board and sell their ten thousand shares, day after day, as punctually as doom. “They must have borrowed lots of stocks,” suggested the younger and the smarter Townley. “Can’t we squeeze them?” But wary Tamms would shake his head. A “corner” was a risky boomerang—suchlike manœuvres he was too old a bird to try.

The firm had acquired a new customer that fall; no less a personage than Lionel Derwent. This unaccountable person sold or bought his hundred shares a day, and spent half his time in the office, and pored over the ticker like any other speculator. “So much for your reformers of the world,” said young Townley to Arthur; and Arthur would have thought it strange, but that he was so rapidly learning the lesson of the world; and its first lesson is, as he fancied, that all men are alike; a lesson you will hear nowhere so frequently inculcated as in Washington and Wall Street, though we have humbly expressed our own opinion upon this theme before.

Tamms said that Mr. Derwent was a damned nuisance; but he made himself most agreeable to old Mr. Townley, and would hold the old gentleman in converse by the hour whenever he happened to meet him in the office. Derwent seemed still to take great interest in Arthur too; but Charlie found him even a greater bore than Tamms. For he was also a continual visitor at the Livingstones; and Charlie worried over it. “Where a man’s treasure is, there shall his heart be also.”

Charlie was growing very nervous about the state of things down-town; and it would be a little too bad to have the prize snatched from him in the moment of fruition. He had had a devilish good time in his life for the last ten years; since in fact he had got out of leading strings; and then he had looked about him with a judicious eye, and carefully selected the rich girl who seemed, on the whole, the best adapted to make him comfortable; and he meant to continue to have a good time for many years to come, please the pigs. A conservative estimate (and Townley knew something of the state of the coffers) placed the Livingstone fortune at a million and a half; there was no entangling family, and both Mamie’s parents were very old.

So he sent her flowers for every evening’s amusement, whether it were concert, ball, or dinner; and called there twice a week; his flowers never came with a card, but always had a sort of trademark of their own. Good judges said that Charlie Townley was compromising himself. Not only this, but all the most recherché little parties that so experienced a fashionable could invent; just the sort of thing that made Mamie’s young friends open their eyes, with envy; club dinners, and private dances at the country clubs, and seats upon the smartest coaches and in the most unquestioned opera-boxes; and these not mere “bud” parties, but with Mrs. Malgam, Pussie De Witt, or Mrs. Gower herself as guests. Thus Townley wooed her millions with his own scarce dollars and the aid of his acquaintance and his worldly wisdom. And Gracie found that Mamie was infatuated.

Something impelled her to make no secret of her troubles to John Haviland; and Haviland had taken Derwent into council. And that audacious gentleman had seriously proposed, first, kidnapping; taking him off for a cruise in a yacht; a month’s delay, he said was all they needed. Then he suggested that they might get him publicly drunk. The enthusiast was no stickler for the commonplace, at best; Derwent was a man of Oriental methods, obvious and frank. But Townley had, unfortunately, no small vices; it would be quite impossible to get him drunk. And Derwent cursed “the bourgeois squeamishness for human life” that prevented as he said, “an honest duel, while making dull misery of all one’s days, and vulgar trash of the nineteenth century’s soul.” And then Derwent hit upon a plan which surely no one but himself would have thought of; and all for Gracie’s sake; and began to frequent Townley’s office.

People began to wonder why Derwent stayed on in New York. It was true he was very attentive to Mamie Livingstone; but it was scarcely possible that the lionized Derwent had met his fate at last in a boarding-school miss. Mamie herself, however, began to think such was the case; and was duly flattered by it. Gracie had many a time told her that a lady need never allow a gentleman to propose to her whom she proposes rejecting;—but, dear me, that was all the zest of a girl’s life—before she was married. She made one or too fitful efforts to discourage him, but the big man would not be discouraged. And really who could have the hardness of heart, even sober Gracie, to forbid a girl her very first offer? And such an interesting one too; Mamie was so anxious to see how he would do it. And she blushed with pleasure as he came to see her.

But all this was rage and desperation to our friend young Townley. He seriously thought of forcing the issue then and there; but he did not quite yet dare. Yet he certainly must do something soon; no one—not even the clairvoyant Derwent—knew better than Charlie Townley that he certainly must do something soon. The strikers down in Pennsylvania were said to be starving; but sooner or later starving men will make a hole in even Tamms’s pockets.

Suppose they had a panic. They could not possibly carry the great railroad, and the margins, and the Starbuck Oil, through a serious trade disturbance. So long as the strikers contented themselves with trying to burn up railway iron and killing an obscure policeman or two—railway iron was cheap enough—in fact, they made it—and a policeman or two could be replaced. But a big, dramatic bit of rapine that would strike terror to the investing public, the comfortable bourgeois, the lambs who sat at home in their carpet-slippers and looked at chromos of old English farmyards—and Remington’s big pile stood no longer ready to support them when things got bad; in fact, he suspected that that obsolete old Christian would like nothing better than to make the public run.

Still, Townley did not dare to ask her at her house. You are at a woman’s mercy, there; she may ring the bell; she may even call her mother; you cannot choose your place, the stage-setting that most becomes you, arrange your lights, and select your own dramatis personæ. Charlie Townley was much like any other man, in the garish afternoon, and by the domestic fireside; in fact there was a certain quite intelligent look in Mamie’s pretty eyes at times which Townley found it hard to face. Yet he was perfectly certain that he had fascinated her. How did he know? Well, he had kissed her. Townley’s maxim was to kiss a woman first and win her afterwards; at the worst, you got but a rebuff for an audacity not in all eyes unadmirable; while, if you formally proposed, and were rejected, you had your value lowered in the eyes of all the world.

He resolved that it must be on his own ground and very late at night, and in the midst of a very gay assemblage. He got up a country party of his own, matronized by Mrs. Malgam; and had meant to settle matters while exhibiting this other pretty woman submissive at his feet. But Mrs. Malgam also had another string to her bow; and the other string was Derwent, whom Townley had to ask: “a damned clumsy Englishman,” said he to her, “who has a cursed knack at getting in the wrong place at the wrong time.”—“In the right time, you mean,” laughed Mrs. Malgam; she knew Townley’s game well enough; but did not conceive it possible that he could mean to marry yet. And this belief was indeed so general that it came to Mamie’s ears; and she began to doubt it, too, and was for the doubt, ten times more infatuated with him than ever.

So Townley made up his mind that his only perfectly certain chance was the Duval ball; and this did not come off for some weeks yet.

For the whole Duval gens was about to celebrate its reception among the immortals and Miss Pussie’s happy marriage, by giving a grand ball, the grandest ball that e’er was known, in our republican simplicity. Two thousand invitations had been sent out addressed to everyone who did not care to go, and to nobody who did. Two smaller packets of tickets had been sent, one to Boston and one to Philadelphia, addressed to Mrs. Weston and Mrs. Rittenhouse respectively, to be distributed by these ladies, where they would do the most good, as they knew best; and old Antoine Duval felt that he had safely bought his social distinction at last as he had bought his membership in clubs from obliged business friends and the legislation for his railroads from Congress and the Legislature of his native State.

Meantime, Townley’s visits grow more frequent; but no more so than Derwent’s; and poor Mamie is quite puzzled and troubled between the two. All her maiden’s dreams are yet of Townley, and gilded with his social splendor; but she secretly bought a copy of Derwent’s “Travels in the Desert” and read it on the sly. She was surprised to find the book was all about the East End of London; and a friend told her that if she had wanted his real adventures, she should have read “The Treasures of the King.” Yet she is sure she does not care for him, and indeed will tell him so, if she shall ever have the chance.

She has the chance, and very soon—some three days before the great Duval ball. But it is hard for a maiden at such times to be very speedy with her tongue; particularly when the man is a very strong one, whom she is very much afraid of, and yet holds in some reverence; and who has a marvellous blue fire in his two deep eyes. Still, Mamie does refuse him; and he only seems to plead the more; as if the refusal were the one thing needed to put new heart into him. And he takes her trembling hand—there is a magnetism in his own brown and steady one that is not to be resisted—and begs at least for some respite—three months’ consideration—a month’s, at least—and there is something strangely thrilling in hearing a brave man talk to you of his love, his love, for you, just you, and not some outside person—and Mamie knows not how, but somehow, strangely, finds herself in tears. And then, as he draws still closer to her, the door opens and Gracie comes in.

She starts back, of course, but it is too late, and the man has sprung to his feet, and she is still sillily blushing and crying. What is it that makes Mr. Derwent’s face turn, as he stands there, so strangely white? His voice is strong enough after a second, though, and he speaks almost instantly.

“I beg you, do not go, Miss Holyoke. You have seen quite too much to have any doubt; nor need there be embarrassment about so plain a thing. I know that—that your kind heart loves your cous—loves Miss Livingstone—more than all the world, and you will surely tell her what is best. As—as you must have fancied, I have asked her to marry me. Unhappily, I have not seemed worthy to her; and I only beg her now for some delay.” Yet there was a curious dead level about Derwent’s voice, as if he dare not trust himself on more than one key; and Gracie’s quiet eyes turn on his with some wonder. There is a silence broken only by Mamie’s sobbing. She had no idea such fun would prove so little mirthful, for she knew very well that she did not care for Lionel Derwent, who was old enough to be her father, and yet, as it seemed, he really loved her.

Derwent cut the matter short at last. “I must spare you any more to-day, Miss Livingstone. Forgive me, Miss Holyoke. I will call for your answer in a week, Miss Livingstone—surely, you will grant me that delay?” And he strode out of the room, hat and cane in hand, valiantly, and yet his eyes did not meet Gracie’s; a month’s delay, he was sure, would save her cousin from Townley; and he had sacrificed himself to gain this month’s delay. For now he might never tell his love for Gracie.

As he entered the hall the servant opened the front door and let Charlie Townley in. Derwent nodded slightly. “H’ are you,” said the other, as they passed.