SOME ten days later, Reuben Tracy was vastly surprised one afternoon to receive a note from Miss Minster. The office-boy said that the messenger was waiting for an answer, and had been warned to hand the missive to no one except him. The note ran thus:
Dear Sir: I hope very much that you can find time to call here at our house during the afternoon. Pray ask for me, and do not mention to any one that you are coming.
It will not seem to you, I am sure, that I have taken a liberty either in my request or my injunction, after you have heard the explanation. Sincerely yours,
Kate Minster.
Reuben sent back a written line to say that he would come within an hour, and then tried to devote himself to the labor of finishing promptly the task he had in hand. It was a very simple piece of conveyancing—work he generally performed with facility—but to-day he found himself spoiling sheet after sheet of “legal cap,” by stupid omissions and unconscious inversions of the quaint legal phraseology. His thoughts would not be enticed away from the subject of the note—the perfume of which was apparent upon the musty air of the office, even as it lay in its envelope before him. There was nothing remarkable in the fact that Miss Minster wanted to see him—of course, it was with reference to Jessica’s plan for the factory-girls—but the admonition to secrecy puzzled him a good deal. The word “explanation,” too, had a portentous look. What could it mean?
Mrs. Minster had been closeted in the library with her lawyer, Mr. Horace Boyce, for fully two hours that forenoon, and afterward, in the hearing of her daughters, had invited him to stay for luncheon. He had pleaded pressure of business as an excuse for not accepting the invitation, and had taken a hurried departure forthwith.
The two girls exchanged glances at all this. Mr. Boyce had never been asked before to the family table, and there was something pre-occupied, almost brusque, in his manner of declining the exceptional honor and hurrying off as he did. They noted, too, that their mother seemed unwontedly excited about something, and experience told them that her calm Knickerbocker nature was not to be stirred by trivial matters.
So, while they lingered over the jellied dainties of the light noonday meal, Kate made bold to put the question:
“Something is worrying you, mamma,” she said. “Is it anything that we know about?”
“Mercy, no!” Mrs. Minster replied. “It is nothing at all. Of course, I’m not worried. What an idea!”
“I thought you acted as if there was something on your mind,” said Kate.
“Well, you would act so, too, if—” There Mrs. Minster stopped short, and sighed.
“If what, mamma?” put in Ethel. “We knew there was something.”
“He sticks to it that issuing bonds is not mortgaging, and, of course, he ought to know; but I remember that when they bonded our town for the Harlem road, father said it was a mortgage,” answered the mother, not over luminously.
“What bonds? What mortgage?” Kate spoke with emphasis. “We have a right to know, surely!”
“However, you can see for yourself,” pursued Mrs. Minster, “that the interest must be more than made up by the extra price iron will bring when the trust puts up prices. That is what trusts are for—to put up prices. You can read that in the papers every day.”
“Mother, what have you done?”
Kate had pushed back her plate, and leaned over the table now, flashing sharp inquiry into her mother’s face.
“What have you done?” she repeated. “I insist upon knowing, and so does Ethel.”
Mrs. Minster’s wise and resolute countenance never more thoroughly belied the condition of her mind than at this moment. She felt that she did not rightly know just what she had done, and vague fears as to consequences rose to possess her soul.
“If I had spoken to my mother in that way when I was your age, I should have been sent from the room—big girl though I was. I’m sure I can’t guess where you take your temper from. The Mauverensens were always——”
This was not satisfactory, and Kate broke into the discourse about her maternal ancestors peremptorily:
“I don’t care about all that. But some business step has been taken, and it must concern Ethel and me, and I wish you would tell us plainly what it is.”
“The Thessaly Company found it necessary to buy the right of a new nail machine, and they had to have money to do it with, and so some bonds are to be issued to provide it. It is quite the customary thing, I assure you, in business affairs. Only, what I maintained was that it was the same as a mortgage, but Judge Wendover and Mr. Boyce insisted it wasn’t.”
It is, perhaps, an interesting commentary upon the commercial education of these two wealthy young ladies, that they themselves were unable to form an opinion upon this debated point.
“Bonds are something like stocks,” Ethel explained. “They are always mentioned together. But mortgages must be different, for they are kept in the county clerk’s office. I know that, because Ella Dupont’s father used to get paid fifty cents apiece for searching after them there. She told me so. They must have been very careless to lose them so often.”
Mrs. Minster in some way regarded this as a defence of her action, and took heart. “Well, then, I also signed an agreement which puts us into the great combination they’re getting up—all the iron manufacturers of Pennsylvania and Ohio and New York—called the Amalgamated Pig-Iron Trust. I was very strongly advised to do that; and it stands to reason that prices will go up, because trusts limit production. Surely, that is plain enough.”
“You ought to have consulted us,” said Kate, not the less firmly because her advice, she knew, would have been of no earthly value. “You have a power-of-attorney to sign for us, but it was really for routine matters, so that the property might act as a whole. In a great matter like this, I think we should have known about it first.”
“But you don’t know anything about it now, even when I have told you!” Mrs. Minster pointed out, not without justification for her triumphant tone. “It is perfectly useless for us women to try and understand these things. Our only safety is in being advised by men who do know, and in whom we have perfect confidence.”
“But Mr. Boyce is a very young man, and you scarcely know him,” objected Ethel.
“He was strongly recommended to me by Judge Wendover,” replied the mother.
“And pray who recommended Judge Wendover?” asked Kate, with latent sarcasm.
“Why, he was bom in the same town with me!” said Mrs. Minster, as if no answer could be more sufficient. “My grandfather Douw Mauverensen’s sister married a Wendover.”
“But about the bonds,” pursued the eldest daughter. “What amount of money do they represent?”
“Four hundred thousand dollars.”
The girls opened their eyes at this, and their mother hastened to add: “But it really isn’t very important, when you come to look at it. It is only what Judge Wendover calls making one hand wash the other. The money raised on the bonds will put the Thessaly Company on its feet, and so then that will pay dividends, and so we will get back the interest, and more too. The bonds we can buy back whenever we choose. I managed that, because when Judge Wendover said the bonds would be perfectly good, I said, ‘If they are so good, why don’t you take them yourself?’ And he seemed struck with that and said he would. They didn’t get much the best of me there!”
Somehow this did not seem very clear to Kate. “If he had the money to take the bonds, what was the need of any bonds at all?” she asked. “Why didn’t he buy this machinery himself?”
“It wouldn’t have been regular; there was some legal obstacle in the way,” the mother replied. “He explained it to me, but I didn’t quite catch it. At all events, there had to be bonds. Even he couldn’t see any way ont of that.”
“Well, I hope it is all right,” said Kate, and the conversation lapsed.
But upon reflection, in her own room, the matter seemed less and less all right, and finally, after a long and not very helpful consultation with her sister, Kate suddenly thought of Reuben Tracy. A second later she had fully decided to ask his advice, and swift upon this rose the resolve to summon him immediately.
Thus it was that the perfumed note came to be sent.
Reuben took the seat in the drawing-room of the Minsters indicated by the servant who had admitted him, and it did not occur to this member of the firm of Tracy & Boyce to walk about and look at the pictures, much less to wonder how many of them were of young men.
Even in this dull light he could recognize, on the opposite wall, a boyhood portrait of the Stephen Minster, Junior, whose early death had dashed so many hopes, and pointed so many morals to the profit of godly villagers. He thought about this worthless, brief career, as his eyes rested on the bright, boyish face of the portrait, with the clear dark eyes and the fresh-tinted cheeks, and his serious mind filled itself with protests against the conditions which had made of this heir to millions a rake and a fool. There was no visible reason why Stephen Minster’s son should not have been clever and strong, a fit master of the great part created for him by his father. There must be some blight, some mysterious curse upon hereditary riches here in America, thought Reuben, for all at once he found himself persuaded that this was the rule with most rich men’s sons. Therein lay a terrible menace to the Republic, he said to himself. Vague musings upon the possibility of remedying this were beginning to float in his brain—the man could never contemplate injustices, great or small, without longing to set them right—when the door opened and the tall young elder daughter of the Minsters entered.
Reuben rose and felt himself making some such obeisance before her in spirit as one lays at the feet of a queen. What he did in reality or what he said, left no record on his memory.
He had been seated again for some minutes, and had listened with the professional side of his mind to most of what story she had to tell, before he regained control of his perceptions and began to realize that the most beautiful woman he had ever seen was confiding to him her anxieties, as a friend even more than as a lawyer. The situation was so wonderful that it needed all the control he had over his faculties to grasp and hold it. Always afterward he thought of the moment in which his confusion of mind vanished, and he, sitting on the sofa facing her chair, was able to lean back a little and talk as if he had known her a long time, as the turning-point in his whole life.
What it was in her power to tell him about the transaction which had frightened her did not convey a very clear idea to his mind. A mortgage of four hundred thousand dollars had been placed upon the Minsters’ property to meet the alleged necessities of a company in which they were large owners, and their own furnaces had been put under the control of a big trust formed by other manufacturers, presumably for the benefit of all its members. This was what he made out of her story.
“On their face,” he said, “these things seem regular enough. The doubtful point, of course, would be whether, in both transactions, your interests and those of your family were perfectly safe-guarded. This is something I can form no opinion about. But Mr. Boyce must have looked out for that and seen that you got ‘value received.’”
“Ah, Mr. Boyce! That is just the question,” Kate answered, swiftly. “Has he looked out for it?”
“Curiously enough he has never spoken with me, even indirectly, about having taken charge of your mother’s business,” replied Reuben, slowly. “But he is a competent man, with a considerable talent for detail, and a good knowledge of business, as well as of legal forms. I should say you might be perfectly easy about his capacity to guard your interests; oh, yes, entirely easy.”
“It isn’t his capacity that I was thinking about,” said the young woman, hesitatingly. “I wanted to ask you about him himself—about the man.”
Reuben smiled in an involuntary effort to conceal his uneasiness. “They say that no man is a hero to his valet, you know,” he made answer. “In the same way business men ought not to be cross-examined on the opinions which the community at large may have concerning their partners. Boyce and I occupy, in a remote kind of way, the relations of husband and wife. We maintain a public attitude toward each other of great respect and admiration, and are bound to do so by the same rules which govern the heads of a family. And we mustn’t talk about each other. You never would go to one of a married couple for an opinion about the other. If the opinion were all praise, you would set it down to prejudice; if it were censure, the fact of its source would shock you. Oh, no, partners mustn’t discuss each other. That would be letting all the bars down with a vengeance.”
He had said all this with an effort at lightness, and ended, as he had begun, with a smile. Kate, looking intently into his face, did not smile in response. He thought her expression was one of disappointment.
“Perhaps I was wrong to ask you,” she answered, after a little pause, and in a colder tone. “You men do stand by each other so splendidly. It is the secret of your strength. It is why your sex possesses the earth, and the fulness thereof.”
It was easier for Reuben to smile naturally this time. “But I illustrated my position by an example of a still finer reticence,” he said; “the finest one can imagine—that of husband and wife.”
“You are not married, I believe, Mr. Tracy,” was her comment, and its edge was apparent.
“No,” he said, and stopped short. No other words came to his tongue, and his thoughts seemed to have gone away into somebody else’s mind, leaving only a formless blank, over which hung, like a canopy of cloud, a depressing uneasiness lest his visit should not, after all, turn out a success.
“Then you think I have needlessly worried myself,” she was saying when he came back into mental life again.
“Not altogether that, either,” he replied, moving in his seat, and sitting upright like a man who has shaken himself out of a disposition to doze. “So far as you have described them, the transactions may easily be all right. Everything depends upon details which you cannot give. The sum seems a large one to raise for the purchase of machinery, and it might be well to inquire into the exact nature and validity of the purchase. As for the terms upon which you lend the money to the company, of course Mr. Boyce has secured those. In the matter of the trust, I cannot speak at all. The idea is hateful to me, personally. All such combinations excite my anger. But as a business operation it may improve your property; always assuming that you are capably and fairly represented in the control of the trust. I suppose Mr. Boyce has attended to that.”
“But don’t you see,” broke in the girl, “it is all Mr. Boyce! It is to be assumed that he will do this, to be taken for granted he will do that, to be hoped that he has done the other. That is what I am anxious about. Has he done these things? Will he do them?”
“And that, of course, is what I cannot tell you,” said Reuben. “How can I know?”
“But you can find out.”
The lawyer knitted his ordinarily placid brows for a moment in thought. Then he slowly shook his head. “I am afraid not,” he said, slowly. “I should be very angry if the railroad people, for example, set him to examining what I had done for them; angry with him, especially, for accepting such a commission.”
“I am sorry, Mr. Tracy, if I seem to have proposed anything dishonorable to you,” Miss Kate responded, with added formality in voice and manner. “I did not mean to.”
“How could I imagine such a thing?” said Reuben, more readily than was his wont. “I only sought to make a peculiar situation clear to you, who are not familiar with such things. If I asked him questions, or meddled in the matter at all, he would resent it; and by usage he would be justified in resenting it. That is how it stands.”
“Then you cannot help me, after all!” She spoke despondingly now, with the low, rich vibration in her tone which Reuben had dwelt so often on in memory since he first heard it. “And I had counted so much upon your aid,” she added, with a sigh.
“I would do a great deal to be of use to you,” the young man said, earnestly, and looked her in the face with calm frankness; “a great deal, Miss Minster, but—”
“Yes, but that ‘but’ means everything. I repeat, in this situation you can do nothing.”
“I cannot take a brief against my partner.”
“I should not suggest that again, Mr. Tracy,” she interposed. “I can see that I was wrong there, and you were right.”
“Don’t put it in that way. There was no question of wrong or right. I merely pointed out a condition of business relations which had not occurred to you.”
“And there is no other way?”
Another way had dawned on Reuben’s mind, but it was so bold and precipitous that he hesitated to consider it seriously at first. When it did take form and force itself upon him, he said, half quaking at his own audacity:
“No other way—while—he remains my partner.” Bright women discover many obscure things by the use of that marvellous faculty we call intuition, but they have by no means reduced its employment to an exact science. Sometimes their failure to discover more obvious things is equally remarkable. At this moment, for example, Kate’s feminine wits did not in the least help her to read the mind of the man before her, or the meaning in his words. In truth, they misled her, for she heard only an obstinate reiteration of an unpleasant statement, and set her teeth together with impatience as she heard it.
And had she even kept these teeth tight clinched, and said nothing, the man might have gone on in self-explanation, and made clear to her her mistake. But her vexation was too imperative for silence.
“I am very sorry to have taken up your time, Mr. Tracy,” she said, stiffly, and rose from her chair. “I am so little informed about these matters, I really imagined you could help us. Pray forgive me.”
If Reuben could have realized, as he stood in momentary embarrassment, that this beautiful lady before him had fairly bitten her tongue to restrain it from adding that he might treat this as a professional call, or in some other way suggesting that he would be paid for his time, he might have been more embarrassed still, and angry as well.
But it did not occur to him to feel annoyance—at least, toward her. He really was sorry that no way of being of help to her seemed immediately available, and he thought of this more in fact than he did of the personal aspects of his failure to justify her invitation. He noted that the faint perfume which her dress exhaled as she rose was identical with that of the letter of invitation, and thought to himself that he would preserve that letter, and then that it would not be quite warranted by the circumstances, and so found himself standing silent before her, sorely reluctant to go away, and conscious that there must be a sympathetic light in his eyes which hers did not reflect.
“I am truly grieved if you are disappointed,” he managed to say at last.
“Oh, it is nothing, Mr. Tracy,” she said, politely, and moved toward the door. “It was my ignorance of business rules. I am so sorry to have troubled you.”
Reuben followed her through the hall to the outer door, wondering if she would offer to shake hands with him, and putting both his stick and hat in his left hand to free the other in case she did.
On the doorstep she did give him her hand, and in that moment, ruled by a flash of impulse, he heard himself saying to her:
“If anything happens, if you learn anything, if you need me, you won’t fail to call me, will you?”
Then the door closed, and as Reuben walked away he did not seem able to recall whether she had answered his appeal or not. In sober fact, it had scarcely sounded like his appeal at all. The voice was certainly one which had never been heard in the law-office down on Main Street or in the trial-chamber of the Dearborn County Court-House over the way. It had sounded more like the voice of an actor in the theatre—like a Romeo murmuring up to the sweet girl in the balcony.
Reuben walked straight to his office, and straight through to the little inner apartment appropriated to his private uses. There were some people in the large room talking with his partner, but he scarcely observed their presence as he passed. He unlocked a tiny drawer in the top of his desk, cleared out its contents brusquely, dusted the inside with his hand kerchief, and then placed within it a perfumed note which he took from his pocket.
When he had turned the key upon this souvenir, he drew a long breath, lighted a cigar, and sat down, with his feet on the table and his thoughts among the stars.
Reuben allowed his mind to drift at will in this novel, enchanted channel for a long time, until the clients outside had taken their departure, and his cigar had burned out, and his partner had sauntered in to mark by some casual talk the fact that the day was done.
What this mind shaped into dreams and desires and pictures in its musings, it would not be an easy matter to detail. The sum of the revery—or, rather, the central goal up to which every differing train of thought somehow managed to lead him—was that Kate Minster was the most beautiful, the cleverest, the dearest, the loveliest, the most to be adored and longed for, of all mortal women.
If he did not say to himself, in so many words, “I love her,” it was because the phraseology was unfamiliar to him. That eternal triplet of tender verb and soulful pronouns, which sings itself in our more accustomed hearts to music set by the stress of our present senses—now the gay carol of springtime, sure and confident; now the soft twilight song, wherein the very weariness of bliss sighs forth a blessing; now the vibrant, wooing ballad of a graver passion, with tears close underlying rapture; now, alas! the dirge of hopeless loss, with wailing chords which overwhelm like curses, smitten upon heartstrings strained to the breaking—these three little words did not occur to him. But no lover self-confessed could have dreamed more deliciously.
He had spoken with her twice now—once when she was wrapped in furs and wore a bonnet, and once in her own house, where she was dressed in a creamy white gown, with a cord and tassels about the waist. These details were tangible possessions in the treasure-house of his memory. The first time she had charmed and gratified his vague notions of what a beautiful and generous woman should be; he had been unspeakably pleased by the enthusiasm with which she threw herself into the plan for helping the poor work-girls of the town. On this second occasion she had been concerned only about the safety of her own money, and that of her family, and yet his liking for her had flared up into something very like a consuming flame. If there was a paradox here, the lawyer did not see it.
There floated across his mind now and again stray black motes of recollection that she had not seemed altogether pleased with him on this later occasion, but they passed away without staining the bright colors of his meditation. It did not matter what she had thought or said. The fact of his having been there with her, the existence of that little perfumed letter tenderly locked up in the desk before him, the breathing, smiling, dark-eyed picture of her which glowed in his brain—these were enough.
Once before—once only in his life—the personality of a woman had seized command of his thoughts. Years ago, when he was still the schoolteacher at the Burfield, he had felt himself in love with Annie Fairchild, surely the sweetest flower that all the farm-lands of Dearborn had ever produced. He had come very near revealing his heart—doubtless the girl did know well enough of his devotion—but she was in love with her cousin Seth, and Reuben had come to realize this, and so had never spoken, but had gone away to New York instead.
He could remember that for a time he was unhappy, and even so late as last autumn, after nearly four years had gone by, the mere thought that she commended her protégée, Jessica Lawton, to his kindness, had thrilled him with something of the old feeling. But now she seemed all at once to have faded away into indistinct remoteness, like the figure of some little girl he had known in his boyhood and had never seen since.
Curiously enough, the apparition of Jessica Law-ton rose and took form in his thoughts, as that of Annie Fairchild passed into the shadows of long ago. She, at least, was not a schoolgirl any more, but a full-grown woman. He could remember that the glance in her eyes when she looked at him was maturely grave and searching. She had seemed very grateful to him for calling upon her, and he liked to recall the delightful expression of surprised satisfaction which lighted up her face when she found that both Miss Minster and he would help her.
Miss Minster and himself! They two were to work together to further and fulfil this plan of Jessica’s! Oh, the charm of the thought!
Now he came to think of it, the young lady had never said a word to-day about Jessica and the plan—and, oddly enough, too, he had never once remembered it either. But then Miss Minster had other matters on her mind. She was frightened about the mortgages and the trust, and anxious to have his help to set her fears at rest.
Reuben began to wonder once more what there was really in those fears. As he pondered on this, all the latent distrust of his partner which had been growing up for weeks in his mind suddenly swelled into a great dislike. There came to him, all at once, the recollection of those mysterious and sinister words he had overheard exchanged between his partner and Tenney, and it dawned upon his slow-working consciousness that that strange talk about a “game in his own hands” had never been explained by events. Then, in an instant, he realized instinctively that here was the game.
It was at this juncture that Horace strolled into the presence of his partner. He had his hands in his trousers pockets, and a cigar between his teeth. This latter he now proceeded to light.
“Ferguson has been here again,” he said, nonchalantly, “and brought his brother with him. He can’t make up his mind whether to appeal the case or not. He’d like to try it, but the expense scares him. I told him at last that I was tired of hearing about the thing, and didn’t give a damn what he did, as long as he only shut up and gave me a rest.”
Reuben did not feel interested in the Fergusons. He looked his partner keenly, almost sternly, in the eye, and said:
“You have never mentioned to me that Mrs. Minster had put her business in your hands.”
Horace flushed a little, and returned the other’s gaze with one equally truculent.
“It didn’t seem to be necessary,” he replied, curtly. “It is private business.”
“Nothing was said about your having private business when the firm was established,” commented Reuben.
“That may be,” retorted Horace. “But you have your railroad affairs—a purely personal matter. Why shouldn’t I have an equal right?”
“I don’t say you haven’t. What I am thinking of is your secrecy in the matter. I hate to have people act in that way, as if I couldn’t be trusted.”
Horace had never heard Reuben speak in this tone before. The whole Minster business had perplexed and harassed him into a state of nervous irritability these last few weeks, and it was easy for him now to snap at provocation.
“At least I may be trusted to mind my own affairs,” he said, with cutting niceness of enunciation and a lowering scowl of the brows.
There came a little pause, for Reuben saw himself face to face with a quarrel, and shrank from precipitating it needlessly. Perhaps the rupture would be necessary, but he would do nothing to hasten it out of mere ill-temper.
“That isn’t the point,” he said at last, looking up with more calmness into the other’s face. “I simply commented on your having taken such pains to keep the whole thing from me. Why on earth should you have thought that essential?”
Horace answered with a question. “Who told you about it?” he asked, in a surly tone.
“Old ’Squire Gedney mentioned it first. Others have spoken of it since.”
“Well, what am I to understand? Do you intend to object to my keeping the business? I may tell you that it was by the special request of my clients that I undertook it alone, and, as they laid so much stress on that, it seemed to me best not to speak of it at all to you.”
“Why?”
“To be frank,” said Horace, with a cold gleam in his eye, “I didn’t imagine that it would be particularly pleasant to you to learn that the Minster ladies desired not to have you associated with their affairs. It seemed one of those things best left unsaid. However, you have it now.”
Reuben felt the disagreeable intention of his partner’s words even more than he did their bearing upon the dreams from which he had been awakened. He had by this time perfectly made up his mind about Horace, and realized that a break-up was inevitable. The conviction that this young man was dishonest carried with it, however, the suggestion that it would be wise to probe him and try to learn what he was at.
“I wish you would sit down a minute or two,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
Horace took a chair, and turned the cigar restlessly around in his teeth. He was conscious that his nerves were not quite what they should be.
“It seems to me,” pursued Reuben—“I’m speaking as an older lawyer than you, and an older man—it seems to me that to put a four hundred thousand dollar mortgage on the Minster property is a pretty big undertaking for a young man to go into on his own hook, without consulting anybody. Don’t misunderstand me. Don’t think I wish to meddle. Only it seems to me, if I had been in your place, I should have moved very cautiously and taken advice.
“I did take advice,” said Horace. The discovery that Reuben knew of this mortgage filled him with uneasiness.
“Of whom? Schuyler Tenney?” asked Reuben, speaking calmly enough, but watching with all his eyes.
The chance shot went straight to the mark. Horace visibly flushed, and then turned pale.
“I decline to be catechised in this way,” he said, nervously shifting his position on the chair, and then suddenly rising. “Gedney is a damned, meddlesome, drunken old fool,” he added, with irrelevant vehemence.
“Yes, I’m afraid ‘Cal’ does drink too much,” answered Reuben, with perfect amiability of tone. He evinced no desire to continue the conversation, and Horace, after standing for an uncertain moment or two in the doorway, went out and put on his overcoat. Then he came back again.
“Am I to take it that you object to my continuing to act as attorney for these ladies?” he asked from the threshold of the outer room, his voice shaking a little in spite of itself.
“I don’t think I have said that,” replied Reuben.
“No, you haven’t said it,” commented the other.
“To tell the truth, I haven’t quite cleared up in my own mind just what I do object to, or how much,” said Reuben, relighting his cigar, and contemplating his boots crossed on the desk-top. “We’ll talk of this again.”
“As you like,” muttered young Mr. Boyce. Then he turned, and went away without saying good-night. The outer door slammed behind him.
Twilight began to close in upon the winter’s day, but Reuben still sat in meditation. He had parted with his colleague in anger, and it was evident enough that the office family was to be broken up; but he gave scarcely a thought to these things. His mind, in fact, seemed by preference to dwell chiefly upon the large twisted silken cord which girdled the waist of that wonderful young woman, and the tasselled ends of which hung against the white front of her gown like the beads of a nun. Many variant thoughts about her affairs, about her future, rose in his mind and pleasantly excited it, but they all in turn merged vaguely into fancies circling around that glossy rope and weaving themselves into its strands.
It was very near tea-time, and darkness had established itself for the night in the offices, before Reuben’s vagrant musings prompted him to action. Upon the spur of the moment, he all at once put down his feet, lighted the gas over his desk, took out the perfumed letter from its consecrated resting-place, and began hurriedly to write a reply to it. He had suddenly realized that the memorable interview that afternoon had been, from her point of view, inconclusive.
Five times he worked his way down nearly to the bottom of the page, and then tore up the sheet. At first he was too expansive; then the contrasted fault of over-reticence jarred upon him. At last he constructed this letter, which obtained a reluctant approval from his critical sense, though it seemed to his heart a pitifully gagged and blindfolded missive:
Dear Miss Minster: Unfortunately, I was unable this afternoon to see my way to helping you upon the lines which you suggested. I am afraid that this disappointed you.
Matters have assumed a somewhat different aspect since our talk. By the time that you have mastered the details of what you had on your mind, I may be in a position to consult with you freely upon the whole subject.
I want you to believe that I am very anxious to be of assistance to you, in this as in all other things.
Faithfully yours,
Reuben TRacy.
Reuben locked up the keepsake note again, fondly entertaining the idea as he did so that soon there might be others to bear it company. Then he closed the offices, went down upon the street, and told the first idle boy he met that he could earn fifty cents by carrying a letter at once to the home of the Minsters. The money would be his when he returned to the Dearborn House.
“Will there be any answer?” asked the boy.
This opened up a new idea to the lawyer. “You might wait and see,” he said.
But the messenger came back in a depressingly short space of time, with the word that no answer was required.
He had hurried both ways with a stem concentration of purpose, and now he dashed off once more in an even more strenuous face against time with the half-dollar clutched securely inside his mitten. The Great Occidental Minstrel Combination was in town, and the boy leaped over snowbanks, and slid furiously across slippery places, in the earnestness of his intention not to miss one single joke.
The big man whom he left went wearily up the stairs to his room, and walked therein for aimless hours, and almost scowled as he shook his head at the waitress who came up to remind him that he had had no supper.
The two Minster sisters had read Reuben’s note together, in the seclusion of their own sitting-room. They had previously discussed the fact of his refusal to assist them—for so it translated itself in Kate’s account of the interview—and had viewed it with almost displeasure.
Ethel was, however, disposed to relent when the letter came.
“At least it might be well to write him a polite note,” she said, “thanking him, and saying that circumstances might arise under which you would be glad to—to avail yourself, and so on.”
“I don’t think I shall write at all,” Kate replied, glancing over the lawyer’s missive again. “He took no interest in the thing whatever. And you see how even now he infers that ‘the lines I suggested’ were dishonorable.”
“I didn’t see that, Kate.”
“Here it is. ‘He was unable to see his way,’ and that sort of thing. And he said himself that the business all seemed regular enough, so far as he could see.—Say that there is no answer,” she added to the maid at the door.
The two girls sat in silence for a moment in the soft, cosey light between the fire-place and the lace-shaded lamp. Then Ethel spoke again:
“And you really didn’t like him, Kate? You know you were so enthusiastic about him, that day you came back from the milliner’s shop. I never heard you have so much to say about any other man before.”
“That was different,” mused the other. Her voice grew even less kindly, and the words came swifter as she went on. “Then it was a question of helping the Lawton girl. He was quite excited about that. He didn’t hum and haw, and talk about ‘the lines suggested’ to him, then. He could ‘see his way’ very clearly indeed. Oh, yes, with entire clearness! And I was childish enough to be taken in by it all. I am vexed with myself when I think of it.”
“Are you sure you are being quite fair, Kate?” pale Ethel asked, putting her hand caressingly on the sister’s knee. “Read the letter again, dear. He says he wants to help you; and he hints, too, that something has happened, or is going to happen, to make him free in the matter. How can we tell what that something is, or how he felt himself bound before? It seems to me that we oughtn’t to leap at the idea of his being unfriendly. I am sure that you believed him to be a wholly good man before. Why assume all at once now that he is not, just because—Men don’t change from good to bad like that.”
“Ah, but was he good before, or did we only think so?”
Ethel went on: “Surely, he knows more about business than we do. And if he was unable to help you, it must have been for some real reason.”
“That is it! I should like to be helped first, and let reasons come afterward.” The girl’s dark eyes flashed with an imperious light. “What kind of a hero is it who, when you cry for assistance, calmly says: ‘Upon the lines you suggest I do not see my way’? It is high time the books about chivalry were burned, if ‘that’ is the modern man.”
“But you did not cry to a hero for assistance. You merely asked the advice of a lawyer about a mortgage—-if mamma is right about its being a mortgage.”
“It is the same thing,” said Kate, pushing the hassock impatiently with her foot.. “Whether the distressed maiden falls into the water or into debt, the principle is precisely the same.”
“He couldn’t do what you asked, because it would be unfair to his partner. Now, isn’t that it exactly? And wasn’t that honorable? Now, be frank, Kate.”
“The partner would have gone into anything headlong, asking no questions, raising no objections, if I had so much ais lifted my finger. He never would have given, partner a thought.”
Kate, confided this answer to the firelight. She was conscious of a desire just now not to meet her sister’s glance.
“And you like the man without scruples better than the man with them?”
“At least, he is more interesting,” the elder girl said, still with her eyes on the burning logs.
Ethel waited a little for some additional hint as to her sister’s state of mind. When the silence had begun to make itself felt, she said:
“Kate Minster, you don’t mean one word of what you are saying.”
“Ah, but I do.”
“No; listen to me. You really in your heart respect Mr. Tracy very much for his action to-day.”
“For being so much less eager to help me than he was to help the milliner?”
“No; for not being willing to help even you by doing an unfair thing.”
“Well—if you like—respect, yes. But so one respects John Knox, and Increase Mather, and St. Simon What’s-his-name on top of the pillar—all the disagreeable people, in fact. But it isn’t respect that makes the world go round. There is such a thing as caring too much for respect, and too little for warmth of feeling, and generous impulses, and—and so on.”
“You’re a queer girl, Kate,” was all Ethel could think to say.
This time the silence maintained itself so long that the snapping of sparks on the hearth, and even the rushing suction of air in the lamp-flame, grew to be obvious noises. At last Ethel slid softly from the couch to the carpet, and nestled her head against her sister’s waist. Kate put her arm tenderly over the girl’s shoulder, and drew her closer to her, and the silence had become vocal with affectionate mur-murings to them both. It was the younger sister who finally spoke:
“You won’t do anything rash, Kate? Nothing without talking it over with me?” she pleaded, almost sadly.
Kate bent over and kissed her twice, thrice, on the forehead, and stroked the silken hair upon this forehead caressingly. Her own eyes glistened with the beginnings of tears before she made answer, rising as she spoke, and striving to import into her voice the accent of gayety:
“As if I ever dreamed of doing anything at all without asking you! And please, puss, may I go to bed now?”