CHAPTER XIII

A REQUEST

"Miss Cecilia----" said Stuyvesant Twombly into the telephone which stood on his desk. His heart hammered so that his ears ached, and the furniture in the room swayed and bent.

"I want to ask you a favour," he heard. "It matters a great deal to me, and, well, to----" she stopped.

"Yes?" he said, aware that his voice was crisp. He had not meant to have it so, but his voice, when Cecilia was near, did as it pleased.

"It's about John," he heard her say very quickly. "He--you know he cares a great deal about you, and that you influence him greatly. You did more than any one else ever has for him."

"I'm sure," interrupted K. Stuyvesant, "I'm glad. I don't mean that," he blurted out; "I mean----"

"I understand," said Cecilia; "I telephoned you to ask you if you wouldn't come to the house sometimes because of him? I--I'm not home very much. The--the little incident of the boat is quite forgotten----"

K. Stuyvesant coughed.

"I understand you," said Cecilia. "I hope you do me?"

"Yes," answered K. Stuyvesant miserably.

"You will help him?" she questioned further.

"I will," he answered. "I told Miss Marjory I'd do----

"Yes," broke in Cecilia, unable to bear more; "she told me what you said. I'll be more grateful than you can ever know, too."

K. Stuyvesant swallowed convulsively.

"Good-bye," she said in a small voice. "Good-bye," he answered gruffly. He hung up the receiver and stared across the room. His teeth were set with cruel tightness on his lower lip.... He remembered how her little hand had crept into his beneath a blue and green checked steamer blanket. He almost wished he could forget it.... And that distance at which she'd kept him had not been what he'd thought, her proving of his sudden love, but only her inclination. Lord, how he'd dreamed, and still dreamed! ... He'd do what he could for John. He believed much was possible.

And how even the sound of her voice left him! Shaking, and aching with his want. First hot, then cold.... He stared, unseeingly, across his office. He recalled his first evening at the country house when he'd stood by the white wall with a Greek relief, worshipping a little Irish maid.

Then Marjory had come. He wished she hadn't. He almost hated her, and found no reason why he should, except for her telling him something which haunted his long nights.... "Cecilia, Cecilia!" ran through his head,--and heart.... For her, he'd do what he could for John. He reached for the telephone and called a number he knew too well. After an interval, and a request, John answered.

At first his tone was languid, then it leaped into colour from pleasure, and K. Stuyvesant hid his eyes.... John, genuine, echoed the dearest Cecilia. His voice, even in its grating boy-quality, held a hint of hers.

"Then we'll go riding?" K. Stuyvesant asked.

"I'd be jolly glad to!" answered John. "I've wanted to see you, but I thought I'd better not bother you."

"We'll take in the aeroplane show," said K. Stuyvesant, "if you like." John liked very much. He hung up the receiver, looking like a boy. His thickened eyelids were lifted, his eyes wide open.

Looking toward the photograph of Fanchette, he recalled an engagement. "You may go to hell!" he said loudly, not stopping to think that his staying away would not send her there; but that she was more liable to its admittance on earth, if he, and other idle young men of his stamp, were with her.

The aeroplane show! That would be great! Of all the chaps he'd ever known he most admired K. Stuyvesant, and to chum with him! Well, wouldn't the fellows look! Well, rather!

In the hall he passed Jeremiah. "Going out with Stuyvesant," he called pleasantly. Confiding his intentions or aim in direction was unusual. Both he and Jeremiah wondered at it. Jeremiah was so pleased that he was past smiling. A little quirk came in his heart, and he whispered, "Just then he looked like Mary used to when I brung her the wages. He did! I wished she could have saw him!" Then Jeremiah went on down the hall, stooping a little more than usual, as he always did with the thought that made him old.

"A bunnit with pink roses on!" he muttered next. That always came with his memory of Mary, that "bunnit" that she never had.

"Hello, Madden," said K. Stuyvesant. John threw out his chest. K. Stuyvesant had acknowledged him a man. "How're yuh?" he added. John said that he was well. As they spoke they sped away from the stern-faced houses of New York's moneyed folk and into its hum.

"Glad to be in town again," said John; "awful glad to see you too. Got beastly quiet out there after Marjory left. Can't be sleepy while _she's_ around!" K. Stuyvesant assented.

"You mashed on her too?" inquired John. K. Stuyvesant took his eyes, for the faintest second, from the street ahead. Then he looked back. He had answered. John felt limp, and adored with more fervor. "Didn't mean to offend," he muttered.

They had spent a pleasant afternoon. At least John thought so, the pleasantest, he thought, for ages, but just now he was suffering from a profound shock. K. Stuyvesant had said something that had left John mentally holding on to his solar plexus.

"You say it's an evidence of _youth_ to get drunk?" said John.

"Uh huh," answered K. Stuyvesant in an indifferent tone. "Surest sign in the world that a fellow's about nineteen. You know how it is, a chap wants to get old, be thought old, so he imitates what he thinks is manhood. Like a kid, picking out gilt instead of gold, he picks out a drunk, and thinks it's a man. Look at that motor! _Some_ peach!"

"Yes," agreed John absently. However he hadn't seen the motor. He was hoping with violence that K. Stuyvesant had not heard of his lurid past. For the first time he thought of his "past" without pleasure. Heretofore his "past" had been like a treasured museum. Each piece of fresh wickedness added to it with great pleasure, and the knowledge that its value was greater.

"Everybody goes through that stage," said K. Stuyvesant, quite as if he'd read John's mind. "It's the measles of the pin-feather age. Look here, John, whatcha think of that shaft? Looks kinda heavy to me."

"Hollow, aluminum," said John in a little voice. He was suffering from a complete emotional turn over. It was difficult to contemplate shafts. K. Stuyvesant fingered a frame with interest. "Like to own one," he said, "darned if I wouldn't!"

"Keep yer hands off them machines!" said a loud voice, the owner of which glared on K. Stuyvesant. K. Stuyvesant removed his hands. He also smiled. John was nettled. His great dignity was hurt.

"Why didn't you tell him who you were?" he asked of Stuyvesant with heat.

"Oh, Lord!" said Stuyvesant. "Why should I? The fact that I draw a little more on pay day than the next fellow doesn't give me the divine right to paw all over the works." John was silent. He was again mentally steadying his solar plexus. The afternoon had been full of earthquakes to his small ideas, and reconstruction.

"Look here," said John seriously, "did you go through that period?"

K. Stuyvesant looked sheepish, then he laughed. "Sure," he said; "I was a real devil at twenty. I couldn't stand girls because I thought they laughed at me, so I decided to drink myself to death. My proud ideal was to be the heaviest drinker in New York, and to be so pointed out. Sometimes I stayed out as late as two."

John laughed with him, although his inclinations were far from laughter. Coarse hands were despoiling his altar, and, worse, laughing at it, as an echo of childhood.

K. Stuyvesant had seated himself on a folding chair that smelled of a hearse. John settled by him. "These chairs always make me think of Uncle Keefer's funeral," said Stuyvesant. "Mother went, draped in eighteen yards of crape. She mourned him deeply until she heard the will, then she tore off the weeds and had 'em burned."

John was far away, so the subject of Uncle Keefer's funeral was abandoned.

"Did--did you collect girls' photographs?" asked John.

"Girls never liked me," said Stuyvesant, "and guns weren't allowed. I did use to have a gallery of second-rate actresses decorating my boudoir. I bought the pictures at a photographer's. The less they wore the better. Lord, what a calf period! Hiccoughing, little asses! Makes me sick to think of it!" Real disgust was written on K. Stuyvesant's face. John pushed his hair away from his forehead. He felt very hot. If some one else had spoken, he would not have noticed. But K. Stuyvesant--chased by most of New York! Honestly liked by the fellows, as a good sport. Owner of several cups for several achievements. Rated as "damned indifferent, but a bully chap!"

John felt weak and little,--worse,--he felt terribly young. He looked away from K. Stuyvesant. Perhaps K. Stuyvesant sensed something of his misery, for he laid a big hand on John's shoulder. The hand was cheering.

"Where you going to college?" he asked. John explained that he had not thought of going, that he hated work, and that a certain amount of study seemed necessary for school.

K. Stuyvesant talked persuasively. "If you studied this winter you could enter next fall," he said; "you have all of the year to do it in. I'll look up some decent tutors, and help all I can, but I'm darned stupid, myself. Wish I weren't. All I could do would be to root. I'd do that!"

"Would you kind of help me keep interested?" said John, looking at his feet. "I haven't done anything that I haven't wanted to, for so long, that I've lost the knack. If you'd help me keep interested,--will you?"

"You bet I _will_!" answered K. Stuyvesant.

"Thank you," said John quietly. K. Stuyvesant's hand tightened on John's shoulder convulsively. Then he took it away. Cecilia's voice had seemed to say the little "thank you." He was shaken, and vastly relieved when John began to talk of monoplanes. He wondered with dull misery if all his years would be full of this "where is the rest of me?" feel. "Why isn't she here? _How_ can we be apart when I feel like this?"

He looked at John. The monoplane essay had ceased. "How is your sister?" asked K. Stuyvesant gruffly.

"Cecilia," said John, "I wish you'd come in." He was by the door of his bedroom as he spoke. Cecilia answered that she'd be happy to come in, and stepped past him. "I'm going to college," said John dramatically after he'd closed the door. "Stuyvesant wants me to. He thinks he can get me in his Frat. He's going to buy an aeroplane, but he says I can't go up unless you say so. Can I? Are you glad I'm going to college?"

Cecilia was entirely bewildered, but said she was glad he had decided to go to college. She sat in a low chair by a table, and her bewilderment increased when John took several photographs from his bureau and threw them carelessly into the waste basket. Next she saw Fanchette thrown in a table drawer, which was then slammed.

"John dear," said Cecilia, "_are_ you sick?"

"No," answered John, then she saw a twinkle in his eyes, often there in the little boy days. "I'm Irish," he continued, "and I can see a joke, even on myself. I've tried to be very old, Celie."

She put her arms around his neck. He hid his face against her throat, and she felt him shake. The joke was forgotten. "It's so hard," she heard in muffled tones; "I'm ashamed of dad, and then I try to gloss it over, I----"

"If it hadn't been for dad," said Cecilia slowly, "we would have both been getting slabs of peat out of an Irish bog, surely barefooted, probably hungry."

"It would have been better," said John bitterly.

"Perhaps," answered Cecilia, "but that is not the question. We're here."

"Quite so," said John, and laughed a little. He had drawn away, ashamed of his emotion.

"Have I seemed like a kid to you?" he asked.

Cecilia looked at him squarely. "Yes," she answered.

"Why didn't you help me?" he blurted out. "Let me be the laughing stock of every one. The son of a multi-millionaire, the laughing stock of----"

"If you recollect," interrupted Cecilia, "I did try. More than once. You told me I was only a girl, that I didn't understand. You even told me to mind my business on several occasions."

"Oh, Celie!" said John.

"Dear!" answered Cecilia, in another tone. She sat on the arm of the chair in which he'd thrown himself. He put an arm around her.

"Now that you are awake," said Cecilia, "what do you think of those near-men you've been introducing me to all summer?" She was smiling. John's inclination to anger vanished. He smiled foolishly instead.

"The mixture is the trouble," he said, "with no one whom you can respect to guide you,--no power above. I feel better, naturally, than the Gov'ner."

Cecilia let that pass. "Orchids and hollyhocks in one bed," she said, "but in time I believe you'll come to love the homely honesty of hollyhocks,--those that thrive in all weathers. I believe you will, John. I do."

He got up and stretched. The new man had gone. She saw this, and rose with him. "Good-bye, dear," she said in a very everyday tone; "I'm glad you had a good time this afternoon."

In a flash he changed again. His arms closed about her soft body, and he kissed her. "Celie," he said huskily, "you're the _best_ fellow!"

"Johnny," she answered, "you _darling_!" He gave her another squeeze, and released her. Then he was again the conscious boy. "This darn tie," he muttered, looking in a mirror; "it wads up rottenly!"

Cecilia left indifferently, but outside his door she turned and kissed a panel opposite her small head.

She wore the want-to-cry expression which so worried Jeremiah, but her eyes were happy. They looked like those of a little girl who holds the best beloved, just mended, doll, all fixed up, ready to love and spank some more, to scold, forgive, and kiss.