Part 1

Chapter 14,118 wordsPublic domain

Produced by Al Haines.

*LIGHT-FINGERED GENTRY*

*DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS*

AUTHOR OF "THE SECOND GENERATION," ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK MCMVII

_Published, September, 1907_

*CONTENTS*

CHAPTER

I.--A Matrimonial Mistake II.--A Feast and a Fiasco III.--"Only Cousin Neva" IV.--The Fosdick Family V.--Narcisse and Alois VI.--Neva Goes to School VII.--A Woman's Point of View VIII.--In Neva's Studio IX.--Master and Man X.--Amy Sweet and Amy Sour XI.--At Mrs. Trafford's XII.--"We Never Were" XIII.--Overlook Lodge XIV.--Woman's Distrust--and Trust XV.--Armstrong Swoops XVI.--Hugo Shows His Mettle XVII.--Violette's Tapestries XVIII.--Armstrong Proposes XIX.--Two Telephone Talks XX.--Boris Discloses Himself XXI.--A Sensational Day XXII.--A Duel After Lunch XXIII.--"The Woman Boris Loved" XXIV.--Neva Solves a Riddle XXV.--Two Women Intervene XXVI.--Trafford as a Dove of Peace XXVII.--Breakfast al Fresco XXVIII.--Foraging for Son-in-Law XXIX.--"If I Married You" XXX.--By a Trick XXXI.--"I Don't Trust Him" XXXII.--Armstrong Asks a Favor

*LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS*

Neva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

"She was giving Alois a free hand in planning surroundings"

"'I felt I must see you--must see you at once'"

"'You are my life, the light on my path'"

*LIGHT-FINGERED GENTRY*

*I*

*A MATRIMONIAL MISTAKE*

Toward noon on a stifling July day, a woman, a young woman, left the main walk through the deserted college grounds at Battle Field, and entered the path that makes a faint tracing down the middle of Pine Point. That fingerlike peninsula juts far into Otter Lake; it is a thicket of white pines, primeval, odorous. Not a ripple was breaking the lake's broad, burnished reach. The snowy islets of summer cloud hung motionless, like frescoes in an azure ceiling. But among the pines it was cool, and even murmurously musical.

In dress the young woman was as somber as the foliage above and around her. Her expression, also, was somber--with the soberness of the ascetic, or of the exceedingly shy, rather than of the sad. She seemed to diffuse a chill, like the feel of a precious stone--the absence of heat found both in those who have never been kindled by the fire of life and in those in whom that fire has burned itself out. There was not a trace of coquetry in her appearance, no attempt to display to advantage good points that ought to have been charms. She was above the medium height, and seemed taller by reason of the singular conformation of her face and figure. Her face was long and slim, and also her body, and her neck and arms; her hands, ungloved, and her feet, revealed by her walking skirt, had the same characteristic; the line from her throat to the curve of her bosom was of unusual length, and also the line of her back, of her waist, of her legs. Her hair was abundant, but no one would have guessed how abundant, or how varied its tints, so severely was it plaited and bound to her head. Her eyes were of that long narrow kind which most women, fortunate enough to possess them, know how to use with an effect at once satanic and angelic, at once provoking and rebuking passions tempestuous. But this woman had somehow contrived to reduce even those eyes to the apparently enforced puritanism of the rest of her exterior. She had the elements of beauty, of a rare beauty; yet beautiful she was not. It was as if nature had molded her for love and life, and then, in cruel freakishness, had failed to breathe into her the vital breath. A close observer might have wondered whether this exterior was not a mask deliberately held immobile and severe over an intense, insurgent heart and mind. But close observers are few, and such a secret--if secret she had--would pass unsuspected of mere shallow curiosity.

Within a few yards of the end of the peninsula she lifted her gaze from the ground, on which it had been steadily bent. Across her face drifted a slight smile--cold, or was it merely shy? It revealed the even edge of teeth of that blue-white which is beautiful only when the complexion is clear and fine--and her complexion was dull, sallow, as if from recent illness or much and harassing worry. The smile was an acknowledgment of the salutation of a man who had thrown away a half-finished cigarette and had risen from the bench at the water's edge.

"How d'ye do, Neva," said he, politely enough, but with look and tone no man addresses to a woman who has for him the slightest sex interest.

"How are you, Horace," said she, losing the faint animation her smile had given her face. Somewhat constrainedly, either from coldness or from embarrassment, she gave him her hand.

They seated themselves on the bench with its many carvings of initials and fraternity symbols. She took advantage of his gaze out over the lake to look at him; but her eyes were inscrutable. He was a big, powerful-looking man--built on the large plan, within as well as without, if the bold brow and eyes and the strong mouth, unconcealed by his close-cropped fair mustache, did not mislead. At first glance he seemed about thirty; but there were in his features lines of experience, of firmness, of formed character, of achievement, that could not have come with many less than forty years. He looked significant, successful, the man who is much and shall be more. He was dressed more fashionably than would be regarded as becoming in a man of affairs, except in two or three of our largest cities. In contrast with his vivid, aggressive personality--or, was it simply because of shy, supersensitive shrinking in his presence?--the young woman now seemed colorless and even bleak.

After a silence which she was unable or unwilling to break, he said, "This is very mysterious, Neva--this sending for me to meet you--secretly."

"I was afraid it might not be pleasant for you--at the house," replied she hesitatingly.

His air of surprise was not quite sincere. "Why not?" he inquired. "There isn't anyone I esteem more highly than your father, and he likes me. If he didn't he would not have done all the things that put me under such a heavy debt of gratitude to him." His tone suggested that he had to remind himself of the debt often lest he should be guilty of the baseness of forgetting it.

"It was eighteen months yesterday," said she, "since you were--at the house."

He frowned at what he evidently regarded as a disagreeable and therefore tactless reminder. "Really? Time races for those who have something to do besides watch the clock." Then, ashamed of his irritation, "I suppose it's impossible, in an uneventful place like this, to appreciate how the current of a city like Chicago sweeps a man along and won't release him. There's so much to think about, one has no time for anything."

"Except the things that are important to one," replied she. "Don't misunderstand, please. I'm only stating a fact--not reproaching you--not at all."

"So, your father has turned against me."

"He has said nothing. But his expression, when I happened to speak of you the other day, told me it would be better for you not to come to the house--at least, until we had had a talk."

"Well, Neva, I don't feel I have any reason to reproach myself. I'm not the sort of man who stands about on the tail of his wife's dress or sits round the house in slippers. I'm trying to make a career, and that means work."

"Chicago is only six hours from Battle Field," she said with curiously quiet persistence.

"When I got the position in Chicago," he reminded her with some asperity, "I asked you to go with me. You refused."

"Did you wish me to go?"

"Did you wish to go?"

She was silent.

"You know you did not," he went on. "We had been married nearly six years, and you cared no more about me--" He paused to seek a comparison.

"Than you cared for me," she suggested. Then, with a little more energy and color, "I repeat, Horace, I'm not reproaching you. All I want is that you be frank. I asked you to come here to-day that we might talk over our situation honestly. How can we be honest with each other if you begin by pretending that business is your reason for staying away?"

He studied her unreadable, impassive face. In all the years of their married life she had never shown such energy or interest, except about her everlasting painting, which she was always mussing with, shut away from everybody; and never had she been so communicative. But it was too late, far too late, for any sign of personality, however alluringly suggestive of mystery unexplored, to rouse him to interest in her. He was looking at her merely because he wished to discover what she was just now beating toward. "In the fall," he said, "I'm going to New York to live. Of course, that will mean even fewer chances of my coming--here--coming home."

At the word "home," which she had avoided using, a smile--her secret smile--flitted into her face, instantly died away again. He colored.

"I heard you were going to New York," said she. "I saw it in the newspapers."

"I suppose _you_ will not wish to--to leave your father," he resumed cautiously, as if treading dangerous ground.

"Do you wish me to go?"

He did not answer. A prolonged silence which she broke: "You see, Horace, I was right. We mustn't any longer refuse to look our situation squarely in the face."

His heart leaped. When he got her letter with its mysterious, urgent summons, a hope had sprung within him; but he had quickly dismissed it as a mere offspring of his longing for freedom--had there ever been an instance of a woman's releasing a man who was on his way up? But now, he began to hope again.

"Ever since the baby was born--dead," she went on, face and voice calm, but fingers fiercely interlocked under a fold of her dress where he could not see, "I've been thinking we ought not to let our mistake grow into a tragedy."

"Our mistake?"

"Our marriage."

He waited until he could conceal his astonishment before he said, "You, too, feel it was a mistake?"

"I feared so, when we were marrying," she replied. "I knew it, when I saw how hard you ere trying to do your 'duty' as a husband--oh, yes, I saw. And, when the baby and the suffering failed to bring us together, only showed how far apart we were, I realized there wasn't any hope. You would have told me, would have asked for your freedom--yes, I saw that, too--if it hadn't been for the feeling you had about father--and, perhaps also--" She paused, then went bravely on, "--because you were ashamed of having married me for other reasons than love. Don't deny it, please. To-day, we can speak the truth to each other without bitterness."

"I shan't deny," replied he. "I saw that your father, who had done everything for me, had his heart set on the marriage. And I'll even admit I was dazzled by the fact that yours was one of the first and richest families in the State--I, who was obscure and poor. It wasn't difficult for me to deceive myself into thinking my awe of you was the feeling a man ought to have for the woman he marries." He seemed to have forgotten she was there. "I had worked hard, too hard, at college," he went on. "I was exhausted--without courage. The obstacles to my getting where I was determined to go staggered me. To marry you seemed to promise a path level and straight to success."

"I understand," she said. Her voice startled him back to complete consciousness of her presence. "There was more excuse for you than for me."

"That's it!" he cried. "What puzzles me, what I've often asked myself is, 'Why did she marry me?'"

"Not for the reason you think," evaded she.

"What is that?" he asked, his tone not wholly easy.

"It wasn't because I thought you were going to have a distinguished career."

This penetration disconcerted him, surprised him. And he might have gone on to suspect he would do well to revise his estimate of her, formed in the first months of their married life and never since even questioned, had not her next remark started a fresh train of thought. "So," she said, with her faint smile, "you see you've had no ground for the fear that, no matter how plainly you might show me you wished to be free, I'd hold on to you."

"A woman might have other reasons than mere sordidness for not freeing a man," replied he, on the defensive.

"She might _think_ she had."

"That is cynical," said he, once more puzzled.

"The truth often is--as we both well know," replied she. Then, abruptly, but with no surface trace of effort: "You wish to be free. Well, you are free."

"What do you mean, Neva?" he demanded, ashamed of the exultation that surged up in him, and trying to conceal it.

"Just what I say," was her quiet answer.

After a pause, he asked with gentle consideration of strong for weak that made her wince, "Neva, have you consulted with anyone--with your father or brother?"

"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.

"That has been settled," she replied. "We _are_ free."

"But there are many details----"

"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.

*II*

*A FEAST AND A FIASCO*

"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 boutonnieres 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?"