Part 7

"How mean of you!" she exclaimed, and laughed too.

She thrust back her soup.

"I don't want it. I don't want anything. I can't eat a mouthful. Then I was wrong about his being a society dude?"

"Completely."

"And how is she? S'posing I've made a mistake about her, too?"

"I don't know, I'm sure. I've never seen her."

"You're telling me a fib."

"Ho, truly, I never have. I don't believe there's any such person. I think she's somebody that the papers have just made up. How many people have you found to work for?"

"Oh, three or four. But time for more. Rhyme, ain't it? I'm trying for the Massachusetts Brass, but I'd rather get Ingles. She gave a dance at Kinsley's night before last."

"How many words can you do?"

"About ninety--enough for business; of course I couldn't manage courts or banquets or sermons. I expect she comes down to his office for a check every now and then. Why don't she ever have her picture in the Sunday papers?"

"O Lord! I hope they're above _that_!"

"What's the objection? I'd have mine there quicker 'n scat if I could. I will some time--bet you. And not in any office togs either."

"But don't dream of rivalry. She isn't real; she's only a beautiful myth. What will you take next--roast beef?"

"I don't mind; yes. When I'm alone I usually skip right from soup to pie--or pudding. But I guess I will take something a little solider this time; nothing makes me tireder than sitting still and fidgeting." She tapped her toes on the mosaic pavement, and gave a hitch and a pat to the dimity curtain alongside her. "I squirmed around for an hour, with a whole bookful of other people's notes that I might have been writing out. What sort of a young fellow is he?"

"He has his own way."

"Only child, I suppose?"

"N--no."

"Only son?"

"No--yes--I don't know. How do you like your work?"

"Middling. I'm terrible enterprising, but I guess I was never meant for a drudge. Say, what does a patroness really do?"

"Oh, nothing much; she just has her name on the list. Sometimes they don't even go."

"I notice that your Mrs. Floyd is beginning to be one; I've seen her in the papers two or three times."

"She doesn't like it, though; sometimes names get put on just to fill up. 'My dear Mrs. Floyd, we thought you wouldn't mind; you don't, do you?' they say. 'But my name in the papers,' she objects. 'You are too sensitive,' they reply. 'You've had your name in the papers at home,' her husband reminds her. 'Yes,' she answers, 'but--here!' She hates the town."

"Well, if I was a patroness I guess I'd have some say--no figure-head for me. I wouldn't be put on, either; I'd put the others on."

"I see you were cut out for a 'society' career."

"I guess you've about struck it. I went to a dance a week ago to-night--Periclean Pleasure Party."

"Like it?"

'Twa'n't much. And I was invited to a firemen's ball--such impudence!"

"Right--don't cheapen yourself."

"I guess I understand that."

Meanwhile a nooning of a different character was going on in the directors' room of the Underground. This is not to be taken as indicating that the green-baize plane of the long centre-table was littered with reports and memoranda, and that the high-backed, leather-seated chairs were filled with the solid figures of a dozen solid men. No; the aspect of the room was that of Sunday-like disoccupation, and the only people in it were an appealing young woman and a stubborn old man.

"Let her come in, father; please do."

"Take care, Abbie. You know what I think of you, but you make a mistake when you try this."

Abbie Brainard passed her handkerchief across her tearful face. Her father stood before her with his legs spread wide and his feet firmly planted; he had his hands thrust deeply into his trousers pockets. His jaw was set, and his shaggy brows were drawn down over eyes that glared fiercely at nothing.

"Then meet her out in the hall somewhere, just for a minute." She laid her hand tremblingly upon the old man's arm. He moved, as if to shake it off.

"Then just walk by outside; she can see you from the cab."

He turned his eyes upon her, half in expostulation and half in threat. "Abbie!"

"Then, father, just step here to the window; she'll see you and know it's all right. Come." She caught hold of a fold of his sleeve. "You won't keep her waiting out there such a cold day as this?"

Brainard moved his feet, but he turned his back on the window and fixed his eye on the fireplace. His daughter's light touch was quite powerless on his huge bulk.

"Father, you know Burt says--"

"Abbie," he interrupted sharply, "don't you say a word to set me against Burt. I won't hear it. Don't drag him in, or you'll be sorry for it." "But, father, don't you understand? He _struck_ her; there's a mark on her face now."

Brainard's great frame shook, but he made no other sign. This quiet she took as a favorable symptom. She would have done better in perceiving that he was between two contending forces so nearly equal as to hold him almost in equilibrium. The wretch had struck his daughter--a brutal, hateful thing as regarded his daughter or any daughter or any other woman; but his daughter had defied him, overridden him, and the man whom she had chosen for a master was now the instrument of her punishment. The accounts appeared to balance. However, figures do lie, and his own agitation indicated that the _x_ of human emotion had not been completely eliminated from his problem.

He cleared his throat. "She has made her bed, Abbie," he said in a husky tone, "and now she must lie on it."

"No, father; you must hear what Burt says. He has had to go up there and--"

"Burt? Is that where he has been this morning? Has he turned against me too? Good God! what have I done to deserve such treatment as this? First it's Mark, with his drawing and his trying to play the fiddle; and then it's this pen-pusher that puts on those things Sundays and marches around singing songs; and now it's Burt, who's had every chance to make a good business-man of himself, and everything done for him. It's too bad; it's too almighty bad."

Abbie steadied herself against the corner of the table. Her breast heaved with fearfulness; she had never before openly protested to her father against himself.

"Why haven't you done anything for the others? Why didn't you give Mark an education?--the kind, I mean, that would have helped him, and the only kind. Why haven't you taken this Mr.--Mayme's hus--this man and made the best of it, and found something for him to do?--he can work in an office. Oh, father," she moaned, with a softening note of deprecation, "you have made it pretty hard for all of us."

"Abbie," he gasped, "are you turning against me too? Abbie, I've always thought so much of you, and I've done well by you. But I want you to go away--I won't see her. I won't. She must go away, and you too."

He caught her by the arm and tried to move her towards the door--gently, as if she might go of her own accord.

Ogden, on coming in from lunch, found himself intercepted by Freddy Pratt. This youth had a few moments' leisure, and he assailed Ogden between the wardrobe and the wash-stand.

"I went over to see the Viberts again; last night," he communicated. "Poor Mayme--I wasn't going back on her, if others did. She was sitting there all alone in the dark. I guess she had been crying. Anyway, when I lit the gas her eyes looked red. She wouldn't say much--"

"Good plan."

"And after he came in she wouldn't say hardly anything at all. Slow work talking to _him!_ He wasn't drunk exactly, but he had been drinking; didn't need a light to tell that. I wasn't doing anything at all, and all of a sudden he blurted out, 'I say, you young fellow you, what do you mean by coming here and destroying the peace of a man's family?' You can bet I was taken back. Then he got up and came towards me--he looked big, too! 'You get out of here'--that's what he said."

"And did you?"

"Oh, yes, I got out," responded Freddy Pratt, with a meek complacency.

"You surprise me. You showed sense."

Freddy looked at him doubtfully. "I heard this morning that he had just lost his place with those insurance people," he resumed cautiously. "That was what was the matter, I guess."

"Possibly," said George, who had heard from Brower that something of the kind was likely to occur. The fellow's work had been done indifferently of late, and he was far from being worth the increased salary he had asked for.

As Ogden passed up to the other end of the office Brainard appeared in the doorway of the directors' room and beckoned to him. His face was pale and disturbed; the veins in the end of his nose showed redly; his eyes burned with an appealing fierceness.

"Ogden," he said, in a loud, hoarse whisper, "where is that type-writer girl? Tell her to bring some water here as quick as she can."

"She isn't here, sir; she has gone back upstairs."

"Then you get some yourself. Here; take this tumbler. Be quick, and don't make any fuss."

Ogden hastened to the wash-stand near which Freddy Pratt had detained him. Returning again, he saw through the half-open door that Abbie Brainard was lying back in one of the big chairs with her face pallid and her eyes closed.

Her father dipped two of his great, clumsy fingers into the glass and made an awkward attempt to sprinkle her face. "My poor girl has fainted," he said.

The girl's eyes half opened; she seemed to see Ogden standing just outside.

She clutched both arms of the chair and raised herself half up. Her bosom heaved; her mouth was drawn tensely.

"Fainted?" she tried to say; "not at all!" She gasped once or twice and rose to her feet. "I never fainted in my life," she said grandly; "I never should think of doing such a thing!"

She reeled; her eyes closed. George rushed forward to catch her. Her hand dropped numb on his arm, and her head fell heavily on his shoulder.

X

Ogden and his mother were now beginning to have frequent conferences with regard to the management of the property and to McDowell's connection with the matter. Perhaps the word "conference" puts, however, too set and formal a stamp on the brief, hap-hazard interchanges of ideas that took place, as chance permitted, within McDowell's own house--a few words after a Sunday dinner or at the front door late at night. And besides being handicapped as to occasion, they were further hampered by McDowell's new relation to them and by their own presence under his roof. Besides, Mrs. Ogden, with a multitude of small experiences, had no ability for grasping things in a large and general way; while George, with a broader and more comprehensive outlook, was embarrassed by a lack of experience in the actual details of business transactions. Added to this, he was a new-comer, under all a new-comer's disadvantages; he hardly knew where to turn for the proper agents, legal or financial, that might have been employed; while many of the agencies--courts, for instance--were different in procedure and even, in name from anything he had known East.

"All the same, though," he said to his mother, "things ought to be in different shape for you. I'm bound hand and foot in that bank--no time or thought for anything outside. I don't know but what you'd better put everything with some good real-estate firm, and let them look after repairs and collections and taxes."

His mother fixed a pair of anxious eyes upon him, and the wrinkles of perplexity appeared on her forehead.

"Eugene is real-estate."

"Or those lawyers," he went on. "Anyway, you ought to have an account as administratrix with some bank. I believe I'll open one to-morrow. Something has got to be done to make things quicker and clearer."

He presently took upon himself the delicate task of intimating to McDowell that a simpler and more regular way of doing things was desired.

He went up to McDowell's office in the latter part of the afternoon. As he entered, a tall, dark man was standing in the middle of the room. There was a sinister look in his eyes and a contemptuously sarcastic smile on his heavy red lips. He gave a last fold to a small piece of paper that he held in his hands and thrust it into his vest pocket. It was Vibert.

"It's pretty near four now," he was saying to McDowell, "so I can't try again to-day; but I expect to find this all right after ten to-morrow morning."

He gave his hand a hardy flip across one side of his dark moustache and passed out. McDowell looked after him sourly. "Damn the brute!" he muttered.

As Vibert's words implied, he had been in McDowell's office once before on the same day. His salary at St. Asaph's now meant more to him than it had meant a month ago, and he had called with reference to it and to the delay in its payment. Hitherto, the financial arrangements of the church had gone on with the same precision as its anthems and its processionals. In the present condition of things delay to Vibert was more than a surprise, more than an embarrassment; it was an exasperation.

"I don't sing for glory," he had declared with an offensive brusqueness. "It's the here and not the hereafter that I'm busy with."

McDowell looked at him uneasily. "I'm going to fix up all the salaries next week in one batch. I don't see why any particular man should be favored."

"Favored!" repeated Vibert, with a loud insolence. "I should say not. I don't feel favored in running my legs off for money three weeks overdue. We can't live on air. We have bills to pay. We ain't singing for the pleasure of it."

McDowell contracted his eyes to a critical narrowness. "You may not be singing much longer for anything else, either."

"That's another matter; it isn't you that put the choir together."

McDowell tapped his fingers on the yellow varnish of his desk. "I don't know about that. From what I hear, you're not making the sort of record for yourself that's useful in a church."

"My private life is nobody's business. I sing; I'm worth the money."

"That may work on the stage; it won't work quite so close to the pulpit. Come, now; I know a little something of your daily doings. Plenty of men sing who _don't_ hang around race-tracks and loaf in pool-rooms. And, from what I hear, you're helping that young Brainard along at a good gait, too. You'd better wait--along with the others."

"Waiting be hanged! I'm here for money--money that's mine. If I can't work it with the man who pays out the loaves and fishes, I'll try one of the men that contribute them, in the first place." He tossed his head insultingly towards the door that led to Ingles's office.

McDowell's elbow rested on the edge of his desk (his thumb on the tip of his ear and his middle finger rubbing his farther eyebrow) as he looked out steadily on Vibert from under his hand. "Joseph," he called to his clerk, "bring me that check-book."

The man opened a lower drawer and brought out a book whose covers enclosed a number of stubs and three or four blank checks.

McDowell wrote and passed the check to Vibert, who went out with no further words on either side.

McDowell did some figuring and saw some people, and somewhat later Vibert returned. He threw his check on McDowell's desk contemptuously. "That's no good."

"How's that?"

"No account with 'em."

"No ac--oh, I see. We've changed banks, and I forgot to change the name in the check." He picked up a ruler and drew the red-ink-bottle a little nearer. "I'll fix it. Sorry to have troubled you. We want to look out for this, Joseph."

Vibert withdrew, speaking the words that Ogden had heard on his entrance--words that would have been the reverse of assuring if he had fully understood them. "Bad egg," said McDowell to him, wagging his head in the direction of the just closed door.

George looked at him studiously. He appeared to be in a state of extreme nervous irritation. His wiry moustache moved up and down stiffly as he felt about with, his teeth for the inner membrane of his lips. His long, lean fingers were interlaced, and a clicking sound came from his snapping his finger-nails together. It was clearly no occasion for more than a partial statement of Ogden's matter, and this was the most that he permitted himself.

But McDowell was in the sensitive state of mind when one word does the work of three, and in the irritable state of mind when talk is such a relief that three words evoke thirty in reply. He met George's brief and modest suggestions with a hitching of his shoulders, and answered them in a harsh and strident tone.

"The first thing in doing business," he said, "is to have an office to do it in." He looked about his own--his desks, his cashier's window, his letter-press. "And the second is to know how to do it." He looked out of the window in a wholly impersonal way, but his words had a more personal slant than he would have given them at almost any other time. "Gad knows I've got enough to do already, but Kittie's affairs are mine. She has equal interests with the others, and she seems to feel that I am able and willing to look after them."

He spoke with some show of reason, and George was obliged so to concede.

"There's taxes, for one thing. Or, take special assessments alone; they're almost a business by themselves. Say you've got ten acres or so just beyond the limits. Some fine day it's six hundred dollars or more for half a mile of side-walk--a sidewalk that won't be walked on by seven people a week. What's the reason? Oh, some one of those township politicians or other has got a friend that's a carpenter. Now, who's going to tackle the boards and stave off such things?"

George looked at him silently.

"There's tax-sales--I guess you never went to one of them. You'd strike a bloodthirsty crew if you did. Supposing you've got a mortgage, and the mortgager don't come to time with his taxes? You've got to buy 'em up to protect yourself. And you've got to get there first. Last year I fought this point for a week with one of those tax-sharks. And so it goes. Real estate is no kindergarten business, I can tell you."

The truth of this view was becoming more and more apparent to Ogden. He withdrew, after some further parleyings, in a confused and inconclusive state of mind--well convinced, however, of McDowell's abilities and more fully conscious of McDowell's position as the husband of his father's daughter. Never did the town of his adoption seem less, indeed, like a kindergarten than when he took his way northward to dinner, or when, later in the early evening, he made his way over to the West Side to call at the Brainards. The thousands of acres of ramshackle that made up the bulk of the city, and the tens of thousands of raw and ugly and half-built prairie that composed its environs, seemed together to constitute a great checker-board over whose squares of "section" and "township" keenness and rapacity played their daring and wary game. And through the middle of the board ran a line, a hinge, a crack--the same line that loomed up in ad those various deeds and abstracts of his with the portentousness and unescapability of the equator--the "line of the third principal meridian."

The Brainard house reared itself in the same frivolous ugliness that we have already viewed; but an excess of light came through the front parlor windows, and Ogden was prepared to find that at least four of the eight burners in the big chandelier were lighted. This turned out to be the case; it was as great a tribute as the family ordinarily paid to society. The family he found represented by Brainard, his wife, and his elder daughter; society was present in the shape of a young couple who were called Mr. and Mrs. Valentine.

The elder daughter received him with a quiet and simple cordiality. He could not help looking about furtively for the possible presence of the younger. He had not remained ignorant of her half-hour wait in a cab outside the bank; but he might have surmised the inflexibility of her father's will. The old man had refused to see her or to let her see him; the most that he would yield was a species of non-committal communication through Burt.

Mrs. Brainard presented herself to Ogden as a peculiarly faded and ineffective person; it was easy enough to grant her an abysmal incapacity. Her husband, in fact, had fallen upon her, crushed her, absorbed her--as a heavy blotting-pad falls on a page of light and delicate writing. Except for one thing she had no aim, no occupation, no diversion--beyond her ills and remedies. This was a penchant for chess. To those who object that chess is an intellectual game, one may simply put the question: have you ever seen it taken up by an elderly, invalided female who has rested content with a mere learning of the moves? It was thus with Mrs. Brainard; she played a good many games with herself every day, and they really soothed and rested her.

On the social board, however, she had hardly learned the first "opening," and the entertainment of the brilliant young couple now in her house fell almost altogether on Abbie; for the girl's mother sank back into a passive silence, while her father toured through the rooms occasionally, and threw out remarks, more or less _à propos_, in a gruff and abrupt fashion peculiar to himself.

His manner with young men had simply closed the house to them. To him it was an inexplicable and harassing thing that a young fellow of twenty-five should not possess the capacity, experience, and accumulations of a man of thirty-five or forty. He regarded every intruder in the light of a potential son-in-law, and no more potential than undesirable. Most of these callers would gulp down once, with such smile as they could master, the old man's abrupt ways and disconcerting comments; then they got out of the house in good order and never came back. However, at the present juncture he did not appear to resent Ogden's appearance--notwithstanding the young man's share in the episode at the bank; perhaps he looked upon him as a serviceable prop in another bad quarter of an hour.

"Yes, Mr. Brainard," Mrs. Valentine was saying, as George entered, "it's just as I have been telling Abbie; you ought to move over on the North Side, too."

Brainard happened to be passing through the room; it had occurred to him that he might turn down one of the side-burners in the back parlor.

"Um, no," he said, in an off-hand way; "too near the lake: fog; damp; rheumatism."

"And pneumonia too, perhaps," his wife suggested feebly.

"I'll risk it!" cried Mrs. Valentine, vivaciously. She had an expansive and affluent effect; she appeared mettlesome, decisive, confident. "It seemed to me that, so long as I was going to build, I might as well make a complete sweep--an out-and-out break. I've always had a fancy for that part of town. So I sent Adrian around to the different offices--"

She threw a look of passing reference towards her husband, who made a little bow in return.

"--and I had the good luck to get a lot on Bellevue Place--one of the last left, and only a block from the Lake Shore drive. Then I went to Mr. Atwater, and he has made my house a perfect little dream! I thought it best to have him to dinner once or twice, and I'm glad I did--he's been so interested all through. There hasn't been the least hitch to speak of, and I expect to get in within a fortnight. This," she went on, turning to Ogden with an undiminished vivacity, "is really my P. P. C."

Ogden glanced at the husband of the lady whose use of the first person singular was so frank and continuous. He was a young man with a pleasant and amiable face, and that face was set in a meek little smile, from whose forced lines the element of deception was most pitifully lacking.