Chapter 10

"I perceive, sir," retorted he, "you have the thick skin necessary to living up to that rule." And the twinkle in his eyes betrayed the man who delights to exercise a real or imaginary talent for caustic wit. Such men are like nettles--dangerous only to the timid touch.

"On the contrary," replied I, easy in mind now, though I did not anger him by showing it, "I am most sensitive to insults--insults to myself. But you are not insulting _me_. You are insulting a purely imaginary, hearsay person who is, I venture to assure you, utterly unlike me, and who doubtless deserves to be insulted."

His purple had now faded. In a far different tone he said: "If your business in any way relates to the family into which you have married, I do not wish to hear it. Spare my patience and your time, sir."

"It does not," was my answer. "It relates to my own family--to my wife and myself. As you may have heard, she is no longer a member of the Ellersly family. And I have come to you chiefly because I happen to know your sentiment toward the Ellerslys."

"I have no sentiment toward them, sir," he exclaimed. "They are non-existent, sir--non-existent! Your wife's mother ceased to be a Forrester when she married that scoundrel. Your wife is still less a Forrester."

"True," said I. "She is a Blacklock."

He winced, and it reminded me of the night of my marriage and Anita's expression when the preacher called her by her new name. But I held his gaze, and we looked each at the other fixedly for, it must have been, full a minute. Then he said, courteously: "What do you wish?"

I went straight to the point. My color may have been high, but my voice did not hesitate as I explained: "I wish to make my wife financially independent. I wish to settle on her a sum of money sufficient to give her an income that will enable her to live as she has been accustomed. I know she would not take it from me. So I have come to ask you to pretend to give it to her--I, of course, giving it to you to give."

Again we looked full and fixedly each at the other. "Come to the house, Blacklock," he said at last in a tone that was the subtlest of compliments. And he linked his arm in mine. Halfway to the rambling stone house, severe in its lines, yet fine and homelike, quaintly resembling its owner, as a man's house always should, he paused. "I owe you an apology," said he. "After all my experience of this world of envy and malice, I should have recognized the man even in the caricatures of his enemies. And you brought the best possible credentials--you are well hated. To be well hated by the human race and by the creatures mounted on its back, is a distinction, sir. It is the crown of the true kings of this world."

We seated ourselves on the wide veranda; he had champagne and water brought, and cigars; and we proceeded to get acquainted--nothing promotes cordiality and sympathy like an initial misunderstanding. It was a good hour before this kind-hearted, hard-soft, typical old-fashioned New Englander reverted to the object of my visit. Said he: "And now, young man, may I venture to ask some extremely personal questions?"

"In the circumstances," replied I, "you have the right to know everything. I did not come to you without first making sure what manner of man I was to find." At this he blushed, pleased as a girl at her first beau's first compliment. "And you, Mr. Forrester, cannot be expected to embark in the little adventure I propose, until you have satisfied yourself."

"First, the why of your plan."

"I am in active business," replied I, "and I shall be still more active. That means financial uncertainty."

His suspicion of me started up from its doze and rubbed its eyes. "Ah! You wish to insure yourself."

"Yes," was my answer, "but not in the way you hint. It takes away a man's courage just when he needs it most, to feel that his family is involved in his venture."

The old man settled back, partially reassured. "Why do you not make the settlement direct?" he asked.

"Because I wish her to feel that it is her own, that I have no right over it whatever."

He thought about this. His eyes were keen as he said: "Is that your real reason?"

I saw I must be unreserved with him. "Part of it," I replied. "The rest is--she would not take it from me."

The old man smiled cynically. "Have you tried?" he inquired.

"If I had tried and failed, she would have been on the alert for an indirect attempt."

"Try her, young man," said he, laughing. "In this day there are few people anywhere who'd refuse any sum from anybody for anything. And a woman--and a New York woman--and a New York fashionable woman--and a daughter of old Ellersly--she'll take it as a baby takes the breast."

"She would not take it," said I.

My tone, though I strove to keep angry protest out of it, because I needed him, caused him to draw back instantly. "I beg your pardon," said he. "I forgot for the moment that I was talking to a man young enough still to have youth's delusions about women. You'll learn that they're human, that it's from them we men inherit our weaknesses. However, let's assume that she won't take it. _Why_ won't she take your money? What is there about it that repels Ellersly's daughter, brought up in the sewers of fashionable New York--the sewers, sir?"

"She does not love me," I answered.

"I have hurt you," he said, quickly, in great distress at having compelled me to expose my secret wound.

"The wound does not ache the worse," said I, "for my showing it--to _you_." And that was the truth. I looked over toward Dawn Hill, whose towers could just be seen. "We live there." I pointed. "She is--like a guest in my house."

When I glanced at him again, his face betrayed a feeling which I doubt if anyone had thought him capable in many a year. "I see that you love her," he said, gently as a mother.

"Yes," I replied. And presently I went on: "The idea of anyone I love being dependent on me in a sordid way is most distasteful to me. And since she does not love me, does not even like me, it is doubly necessary that she be independent."

"I confess I do not quite follow you," said he.

"How can she accept anything from me? If she should finally be compelled by necessity to do it, what hope could I have of her ever feeling toward me as a wife should feel toward her husband?"

At this explanation of mine his eyes sparkled with anger--and I could not but suspect that he had at one time in his life been faced with a problem like mine, and had settled it the other way. My suspicion was not weakened when he went on to say:

"Boyish motives again! They show you do not know women. Don't be deceived by their delicate exterior, by their pretenses of super-refinement. They affect to be what passion deludes us into thinking them. But they're clay, sir, just clay, and far less sensitive than we men. Don't you see, young man, that by making her independent you're throwing away your best chance of winning her? Women are like dogs--like dogs, sir! They lick the hand that feeds 'em--lick it, and like it."

"Possibly," said I, with no disposition to combat views based on I knew not what painful experience; "but I don't care for that sort of liking--from a woman or from a dog."

"It's the only kind you'll get," retorted he, trying to control his agitation. "I'm an old man. I know human nature--that's why I live alone. You'll take that kind of liking, or do without."

"Then I'll do without," said I.

"Give her an income, and she'll go. I see it all. You've flattered her vanity by showing your love for her--that's the way with the women. They go crazy about themselves, and forget all about the man. Give her an income and she'll go."

"I doubt it," said I. "And you would, if you knew her. But, even so, I shall lose her in any event. For, unless she is made independent, she'll certainly go with the last of the little money she has, the remnant of a small legacy."

The old man argued with me, the more vigorously, I suspect, because he found me resolute. When he could think of no new way of stating his case--his case against Anita--he said: "You are a fool, young man--that's clear. I wonder such a fool was ever able to get together as much property as report credits you with. But--you're the kind of fool I like."

"Then--you'll indulge my folly?" said I, smiling.

He threw up his arms in a gesture of mock despair. "If you will have it so," he replied. "I am curious about this niece of mine. I want to see her. I want to see the woman who can resist _you_."

"Her mind and her heart are closed against me," said I. "And it is my own fault--I closed them."

"Put her out of your head," he advised. "No woman is worth a serious man's while."

"I have few wants, few purposes," said I. "But those few I pursue to the end. Even though she were not worth while, even though I wholly lost hope, still I'd not give her up. I couldn't--that's my nature. But--_she_ is worth while." And I could see her, slim and graceful, the curves in her face and figure that made my heart leap, the azure sheen upon her petal-like skin, the mystery of her soul luring from her eyes.

After we had arranged the business--or, rather, arranged to have it arranged through our lawyers--he walked down to the pier with me. At the gangway he gave me another searching look from head to foot--but vastly different from the inspection with which our interview had begun. "You are a devilish handsome young fellow," said he. "Your pictures don't do you justice. And I shouldn't have believed any man could overcome in one brief sitting such a prejudice as I had against you. On second thought, I don't believe I care to see her. She must be even below the average."

"Or far above it," I suggested.

"I suppose I'll have to ask her over to visit me," he went on. "A fine hypocrite I'll feel."

"You can make it one of the conditions of your gift that she is not to thank you or speak of it," said I. "I fear your face would betray us, if she ever did."

"An excellent idea!" he exclaimed. Then, as he shook hands with me in farewell: "You will win her yet--if you care to."

As I steamed up the Sound, I was tempted to put in at Dawn Hill's harbor. Through my glass I could see Anita and Alva and several others, men and women, having tea on the lawn under a red and white awning. I could see her dress--a violet suit with a big violet hat to match. I knew that costume. Like everything she wore, it was both beautiful in itself and most becoming to her. I could see her face, could almost make out its expression--did I see, or did I imagine, a cruel contrast to what I always saw when she knew I was looking?

I gazed until the trees hid lawn and gay awning, and that lively company and her. In my bitterness I was full of resentment against her, full of self-pity. I quite forgot, for the moment, _her_ side of the story.

XVIII.

It was the next day, I think, that I met Mowbray Langdon and his brother Tom in the entrance to the Textile Building. Mowbray was back only a week from his summer abroad; but Tom I had seen and nodded to every day, often several times in the same day, as he went to and fro about his "respectable" dirty work for the Roebuck-Langdon clique. He was one of their most frequently used stool-pigeon directors in banks and insurance companies whose funds they staked in their big gambling operations, they taking almost all the profits, and the depositors and policy holders taking almost all the risk. It had never once occurred to me to have any feeling of any kind about Tom, or in any way to take him into my calculations as to Anita. He was, to my eyes, too obviously a pale understudy of his powerful and fascinating brother. Whenever I thought of him as the man Anita fancied she loved, I put it aside instantly. "The kind of man a woman _really_ cares for," I would say to myself, "is the measure of her true self. But not the kind of man she _imagines_ she cares for."

Tom went on; Mowbray stopped. We shook hands, and exchanged commonplaces in the friendliest way--I was harboring no resentment against him, and I wished him to realize that his assault had bothered me no more than the buzzing and battering of a summer fly. "I've been trying to get in to see you," said he. "I wanted to explain about that unfortunate Textile deal."

This, when the assault on me had burst out with fresh energy the day after he landed from Europe! I could scarcely believe that his vanity, his confidence in his own skill at underground work, could so delude him. "Don't bother," said I. "All that's ancient history."

But he had thought out some lies he regarded as particularly creditable to his ingenuity; he was not to be deprived of the pleasure of telling them. So I was compelled to listen; and, being in an indulgent mood, I did not spoil his pleasure by letting him see or suspect my unbelief. If he could have looked into my mind, as I stood there in an attitude of patient attention, I think even his self-complacence would have been put out of countenance. You may admire the exploits of a "gentleman" cracksman or pickpocket, if you hear or read them with only their ingenuity put before you. But _see_ a "gentleman" liar or thief at his sneaking, cowardly work, and admiration is impossible. As Langdon lied on, as I studied his cheap, vulgar exhibition of himself, he all unconscious, I thought: "Beneath that very thin surface of yours, you're a poor cowardly creature--you and all your fellow bandits. No; bandit is too grand a word to apply to this game of 'high finance.' It's really on the level with the game of the fellow that waits for a dark night, slips into the barnyard, poisons the watch dog, bores an auger hole in the granary, and takes to his heels at the first suspicious sound."

With his first full stop, I said: "I understand perfectly, Langdon. But I haven't the slightest interest in crooked enterprises now. I'm clear out of all you fellows' stocks. I've reinvested my property so that not even a panic would trouble me."

"That's good," he drawled. I saw he did not believe me--which was natural, as he thought I was laboring in heavy weather, with a bad cargo of coal stocks and contracts. "Come to lunch with me. I've got some interesting things to tell you about my trip."

A few months before, I should have accepted with alacrity. But I had lost interest in him. He had not changed; if anything, he was more dazzling than ever in the ways that had once dazzled me. It was I that had changed--my ideals, my point of view. I had no desire to feed my new-sprung contempt by watching him pump in vain for information to be used in his secret campaign against me. "No, thanks. Another day," I replied, and left him with a curt nod. I noted that he had failed to speak of my marriage, though he had not seen me since. "A sore subject with all the Langdons," thought I. "It must be very sore, indeed, to make a man who is all manners neglect them."

My whole life had been a series of transformations so continuous that I had noted little about my advance, beyond its direction--like a man hurrying up a steep that keeps him bent, eyes down. But, as I turned away from Langdon, I caught myself in the very act of transformation. No doubt, the new view had long been there, its horizon expanding with every step of my ascent; but not until that talk with him did I see it. I looked about me in Wall Street; in my mind's eye I saw the great rascals of "high finance," their respectability stripped from them, saw them gathering in the spoils which their cleverly trained agents, commercial and political and legal, filched with light fingers from the pockets of the crowd, saw the crowd looking up to these trainers and employers of pickpockets, hailing them "captains of industry"! They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who did. "Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?" I asked myself. "Or have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane in a lunatic world?"

I did not linger on that problem. For me action remained the essential of life, whether I was sane or insane. I resolved then and there to study out a new course. By toiling like a sailor at the pump of a sinking ship, I had taken advantage to the uttermost of the respite Galloway's help had given me. My property was no longer in more or less insecure speculative "securities," but was, as I had told Langdon, in forms that would withstand the worst shocks. The attacks of my enemies, directed partly at my fortune, or, rather, at the stocks in which they imagined it was still invested, and partly at my personal character, were doing me good instead of harm. Hatred always forgets that its venomous shafts, falling round its intended victim, spring up as legions of supporters for him. My business was growing rapidly; my daily letter to investors was read by hundreds of thousands where tens of thousands had read it before the Roebuck-Langdon clique began to make me famous by trying to make me infamous.

"I am strong and secure," said I to myself as I strode through the wonderful canyon of Broadway, whose walls are the mighty palaces of finance and commerce from which business men have been ousted by the cormorant "captains of industry." I must _use_ my strength. How could I better use it than by fluttering these vultures on their roosts, and perhaps bringing down a bird or two?

I decided, however, that it was better to wait until they had stopped rattling their beaks and claws on my shell in futile attack. "Meanwhile," I reasoned, "I can be getting good and ready."

TO BE CONTINUED.

A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM

By FRANCIS METCALFE

In the region of South Washington Square there are many ancient dwellings which have fallen into uses which would make their original owners, who were the solid men of old New York, turn over in their narrow vaults in Trinity churchyard if they could know of them. Alien peoples, swarthy of skin and picturesque of dress, occupy and surround them, and strange industries are carried on under the roofs which once sheltered the families of the dignified old Knickerbockers who formed the aristocracy of the city.

In many of these transformed residences of the wealthy, after climbing many flights of stairs, whose quaint old mahogany balustrades have been marred by generations of careless movers, one comes to apartments which are provided with skylights and northern windows, and these, being classified as studios, command relatively high rents, considering the lack of every modern convenience and comfort. They are occupied by the younger and unknown artists, who cannot afford the rents demanded in the more fashionable studio buildings, and the reek of the oil stove and odor of cooking, mingling with the smell of paint and turpentine, which pervades the hallways, indicate that they are used as living quarters and work rooms combined.

The whole quarter abounds in cheap restaurants, places where one may obtain a full course dinner, of sorts, and a small bottle of alleged claret included, for an absurdly small sum; but a carton of biscuits, a tin of sardines and a can of condensed milk are usually in evidence on the littered tables of the studios, and, together with the odor of stale coffee, bespeak an economy of diet which is incompatible with the good work which comes of the well-fed body.

It was in one of these small rooms, perched at the top of the tallest among the houses, that a girl lay on a couch, her face buried in her hands, as the early dusk of a winter's afternoon softened the tawdriness of the furnishings. A curtain of burlaps screened one corner, hiding the toilet arrangements, which would have suggested that the couch served as a bed by night; and the flowering plants at the window, the arrangement of artistic posters and sketches on the walls, and, above all, the neatness and orderliness of the room, proclaimed feminine occupancy.

Her attitude was that of dejection, and she had not waited to remove coat or hat before seeking consolation in the refuge of tears; but there was determination in her expression and in the set of her shoulders when she sat up and looked resentfully at the flat package lying on the table. The imprint of a well-known publishing house was on the wrapping paper, and in her hand was a letter from the same firm, thanking her for the privilege of examining the sketches and regretting that they were not fitted to their immediate needs. She lighted a gas jet and re-read the letter, trying to derive some comfort from the courtesy of the declination, but when she unwrapped the sketches, she was forced to acknowledge to herself that they did not seem so strong as when she hopefully submitted them a fortnight before.

These two weeks had been a time of anxiety for Elizabeth Thornton, for so much depended upon the sale of the sketches, the results of months of labor, that she had alternately built castles in the air and wondered what was to become of her, as her mood made her hopeful or despondent of their acceptance. She had sold some of her work during her three years of study in New York, but not enough to pay even her very modest living expenses, and these, together with the fees for tuition at the art school and the purchase of material, had diminished almost to the vanishing point the few hundreds of dollars which she possessed when she commenced her studies.

A knock on the door caused her to glance hastily around the room, to be sure that evidences of domestic occupancy were not scattered about, before opening it to the tall, good-looking young fellow who stood hat in hand, his fur-lined coat thrown open and an expectant smile on his face.

"I have climbed so many stairs that I am not sure whether I have reached heaven or the studio of Miss Elizabeth Thornton," he said, breathlessly, in a cheery voice; but the girl, whose face was in the shadow while his was in the light, extended her hand and greeted him warmly.

"Tom, you irreverent boy! Come inside this minute, before you scandalize my neighbors," she exclaimed. "And now that you are in, tell me how you found me out and how you happen to be in New York."

"In the first place, I am fortunate enough not to find you out, and, secondly, I don't happen to be in New York; I just live here, as I have done any time these past three years. But I didn't know that you did until I met old Oliver, who gave me your address. I didn't know whether it was your place of business or your dwelling; but I came on the chance of finding you."

"And I don't think you appreciate yet that it is both," she said, an amused expression on her face, as she saw him glance around the room.

"Do you really live here, too?" he asked. The evidence of the studio was there, but none of the delicate and dainty traces of a feminine bedchamber.

"Indeed I do, and when it comes 'by-low' time, there is a grand transformation scene," she answered, laughing; and, although he joined in her laughter, there was sadness in his heart as he realized the import of the meager accommodations.

"I don't see a kitchen, at any rate, so I suppose there is no reason why you can't come out to dinner with me this evening," he said.

"Nothing but your presence, which prevents me from changing my gown," she replied, doubtfully. "You can choose between walking the streets and sitting on the stairs outside while I get ready."