Chapter 2

“I gave mine twenty-five dollars,” she whispered. “Wasn’t that enough?”

“Abundant, I should say. But I am not well posted on such matters.” It was evident he wished to avoid the subject, and was also impatient to get away, for he took out his watch. “If Miss Pilgrim is really likely to be detained--” he began.

Miss Golightly rose to the occasion and dismissed him. “I understand,” she exclaimed amiably. “Every minute is precious.”

Nevertheless, it was not until two days later that he succeeded in finding Mary Wellington at home. He called that evening, but was told by the person in charge that she had taken a brief respite from work and would not return for another twenty-four hours. On the second occasion, as the first, he brought with him under his arm a good-sized package, neatly done up.

“I am back again,” he said, and he pressed her hand with unmistakable zeal.

Her greeting was friendly; not emotional like his, or unreserved; but he flattered himself that she seemed very glad to see him. He reflected: “I don’t believe that it did my cause a particle of harm to let her go without the constant visits she had grown accustomed to expect.”

He said aloud: “I came across this on the other side and took the liberty of bringing it to you.”

Mary undid the parcel, disclosing a beautiful bit of jade; not too costly a gift for a friend to accept, yet really a defiance of the convention which forbids marriageable maidens to receive from their male admirers presents less perishable than flowers or sweetmeats.

“It is lovely, and it was very kind of you to remember me.”

“Remember you? You were in my thoughts day and night.”

She smiled to dispel the tension. “I shall enjoy hearing about your travels. A friend of yours has told me something of them.”

“Ah! Miss Golightly. You have seen her, then, at your cousin’s? A companionable woman; and she knows her Europe. Yes, we compared notes regarding our travels.”

He colored slightly, but only at the remembrance of having confided to this comparative stranger his bosom’s secret under the spell of an ocean intimacy.

“You brought home other things, I dare say?” Mary asked after a pause, glancing up at him.

“Oh, yes!” The trend of the question was not clear to him, but he was impelled to add: “For one thing, I ordered clothes enough to last me three years at least. I bought gloves galore for myself and for my sister. As I belong to the working class, and there is no knowing how soon I may be able to get away again, I laid in a stock of everything which I needed, or which took my fancy. Men’s things as well as women’s are so much cheaper over there if one knows where to go.”

“With the duties?”

The words, gently spoken, were like a bolt from the blue. George betrayed his distaste for the inquiry only by a sudden gravity. “Yes, with the duties.” He hastened to add: “But enough of myself and my travels. They were merely to pass the time.” He bent forward from his chair and interrogated her meaningly with his glance.

“But I am interested in duties.”

He frowned at her insistence.

“Miss Golightly,” continued Mary, “explained to us yesterday how she got all her things through the custom-house by giving the inspector twenty-five dollars. She gloried in it and in the fact that, though her trunks were full of new dresses, she made oath that she had nothing dutiable.”

He suspected now her trend, yet he was not certain that he was included in its scope. But he felt her eyes resting on him searchingly.

“Did she?” he exclaimed, with an effort at airy lightness which seemed to afford the only hope of escape.

“How did you manage?”

“I?” He spoke after a moment’s pause with the calm of one who slightly resents an invasion of his privacy.

“Did you pay the duties on your things?”

George realized now that he was face to face with a question which, as lawyers say, required that the answer should be either “yes” or “no.” Still, he made one more attempt to avert the crucial inquiry.

“Does this really interest you?”

“Immensely. My whole future may be influenced by it.”

“I see.” There was no room left for doubt as to her meaning. Nor did he choose to lie. “No, I paid no duties.”

“I feared as much.”

There was a painful silence. George rose, and walking to the mantel-piece, looked down at the hearth and tapped the ironwork with his foot. He would fain have made the best of what he ruefully recognized to be a shabby situation by treating it jocosely; but her grave, grieved demeanor forbade. Yet he ventured to remark:

“Why do you take this so seriously?”

“I expected better things of you.”

He felt of his mustache and essayed extenuation. “It was--er--unworthy of me, of course; foolish--pig-headed--tricky, I suppose. I got mad. I’d nothing to sell, and the declaration is a farce when they examine after it. So I left them to find what they chose. I’m terribly sorry, for you seem to hate it so. But it’s an idiotic and impertinent law, anyway.”

“In other words, you think it all right to break a law if you don’t happen to fancy it.”

George started visibly and colored. He recognized the aphorism as his, but for the moment did not recall the occasion of its use. He chose to evade it by an attempt at banter. “You can’t make a tragedy, my dear girl, out of the failure to pay duties on a few things bought for one’s personal use, and not for sale. Why, nearly every woman in the world smuggles when she gets the chance--on her clothes and finery. You must know that. Your sex as a class doesn’t regard it as disreputable in the least. At the worst, it is a peccadillo, not a crime. The law was passed to enable our native tailors to shear the well-to-do public.”

Mary ignored the plausible indictment against the unscrupulousness of her sex. “Can such an argument weigh for a moment with any one with patriotic impulses?”

Again the parrot-like reminder caused him to wince, and this time he recognized the application.

“Oh!” he exclaimed, with sorry yet protesting confusion.

“It’s the inconsistency,” she answered without flinching, perceiving that he understood.

George flushed to the roots of his hair. “You compare me with that--er--blatherskite?” he asked, conscious as he spoke that her logic was irrefutable. Yet his self-respect cried out to try to save itself.

“Why not? The civil-service law seemed a frill to Jim Daly; the customs law an impertinence to you.”

He looked down at the hearth again. There was an air of finality in her words which was disconcerting.

“I’ve been an ass,” he ejaculated. “I’ll give the things up; pay the duties; go to prison, if you like. The punishment is fine or imprisonment.” He intended to be sincere in his offer of self-humiliation, though his speech savored of extravagance.

Mary shrugged her shoulders. “If you did, I dare say a bevy of society women would tender you a banquet when you were released from jail.”

He bit his lip and stared at her. “You are taking this seriously with a vengeance!”

“I must.”

He crossed the room and, bending beside her, sought to take her hand. “Do you mean that but for this--? Mary, are you going to let a little thing like this separate us?”

He had captured her fingers, but they lay limp and unresponsive in his.

“It is not a little thing; from my standpoint it is everything.”

“But you will give me another chance?”

“You have had your chance. That was it. I was trying to find out whether I loved you, and now I know that I do not. I could never marry a man I could not--er--trust.”

“Trust? I swear to you that I am worthy of trust.”

She smiled sadly and drew away her hand. “Maybe. But I shall never know, you see, because I do not love you.”

Her feminine inversion of logic increased his dismay. “I shall never give up,” he exclaimed, rising and buttoning his coat. “When you think this over you will realize that you have exaggerated what I did.”

She shook her head. His obduracy made no impression on her, for she was free from doubts.

“We will be friends, if you like; but we can never be anything closer.”

An inspiration seized him. “What would the girl whom Jim Daly loves, if there is one, say? She has never given him up, I wager.”

Mary blushed at his unconscious divination. “I do not know,” she said. “But you are one person, Jim Daly is another. You have had every advantage; he is a--er--blatherskite. Yet you condescend to put yourself on a par with him, and condone the offence on the ground that your little world winks at it. Remember

“‘Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues.’

How shall society progress, unless my sex insists on at least that patent of nobility in the men who woo us? I am reading you a lecture, but you insisted on it.”

George stood for a moment silent. “You are right, I suppose.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. Then he turned and left the room.

As he passed out, Mary heard the voices of the orphans, Joe and Frank, in the entry. The former in greeting her held out a letter which had just been delivered by the postman.

“You’ve come back, Miss Wellington,” cried the little boy rapturously.

“Yes, Joe dear.”

Mechanically she opened the envelope. As she read the contents she smiled faintly and nodded her head as much as to say that the news was not unexpected.

“But _noblesse oblige_,” she murmured to herself proudly, not realizing that she had spoken aloud.

“What did you say, Miss Wellington?”

Mary recalled her musing wits. “I’ve something interesting to tell you, boys. Miss Burke is going to be married to Jim Daly. That is bad for you, dears, but partly to make up for it, I wish to let you know that there is no danger of my leaving you any more.”

AGAINST HIS JUDGMENT

Three days had passed, and the excitement in the neighborhood was nearly at an end. The apothecary’s shop at the corner into which John Baker’s body and the living four-year-old child had been carried together immediately after the catastrophe had lost most of its interest for the curious, although the noses of a few idlers were still pressed against the large pane in apparent search of something beyond the brilliant colored bottles or the soda-water fountains. Now that the funeral was over, the womenkind, whose windows commanded a view of the house where the dead man had been lying, had taken their heads in and resumed their sweeping and washing, and knots of their husbands and fathers no longer stood in gaping conclave close to the very doorsill, rehearsing again and again the details of the distressing incident. Even the little child who had been so miraculously saved from the jaws of death, although still decked in the dirty finery which its mother deemed appropriate to its having suddenly become a public character, had ceased to be the recipient of the dimes of the tender-hearted. Such is the capriciousness of the human temperament at times of emotional excitement, the plan of a subscription for the victim’s family had not been mooted until what was to its parents a small fortune had been bestowed on the rescued child; but the scale of justice had gradually righted itself. Contributions were now pouring in, especially since it was reported that the mayor and several other well-known persons had headed the list with fifty dollars each; and there was reason to believe that a lump sum of from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars would be collected for the benefit of the widow and seven children before public generosity was exhausted.

Local interest was on the wane; but, thanks to the telegraph and the press, the facts were being disseminated through the country, and every leading newspaper in the land was chronicling, with more or less prominence according to the character of its readers, the item that John Baker, the gate-keeper at a railroad crossing in a Pennsylvania city, had snatched a toddling child from the pathway of a swiftly moving locomotive and been crushed to death.

A few days later a dinner-company of eight was gathered at a country house several hundred miles distant from the scene of the calamity. The host and hostess were people of wealth and leisure, who enjoyed inviting congenial parties from their social acquaintance in the neighboring city to share with them for two or three days at a time the charms of nature. The dinner was appetizing, the wine good, and conversation turned lightly from one subject to another.

They had talked on a variety of topics: of tarpon fishing in Florida; of amateur photography, in which the hostess was proficient, and of gardens; of the latest novels and some current inelegancies of speech. Some one spoke of the growing habit of feeing employés to do their duty. Another referred to certain breaches of trust by bank officers and treasurers, which occurring within a short time of one another had startled the community. This last subject begot a somewhat doleful train of commentary and gave the lugubrious their cue. Complaints were made of our easygoing standards of morality, and our disposition not to be severe on anybody; of the decay of ideal considerations and the lack of enthusiasm for all but money-spinning.

“The gist is here,” reiterated one of the speakers: “we insist on tangible proof of everything, of being able to see and feel it--to get our dollar’s worth, in short. We weigh and measure and scrutinize, and discard as fusty and outworn, conduct and guides to conduct that do not promise six per cent per annum in full sight.”

“What have you to say to John Baker?” said the host, breaking the pause which followed these remarks. “I take for granted that you are all familiar with his story: the newspapers have been full of it. There was a man who did not stop to measure or scrutinize.”

A murmur of approbation followed, which was interrupted by Mrs. Caspar Green, a stout and rather languid lady, inquiring to whom he referred. “You know I never read the newspapers,” she added, with a decidedly superior air, putting up her eye-glass.

“Except the deaths and marriages,” exclaimed her husband, a lynx-eyed little stockbroker, who was perpetually poking what he called fun at his more ponderous half.

“Well, this was a death: so there was no excuse for her not seeing it,” said Henry Lawford, the host. “No, seriously, Mrs. Green, it was a splendid instance of personal heroism: a gate-keeper at a railway crossing in Pennsylvania, perceiving a child of four on the track just in front of the fast express, rushed forward and managed to snatch up the little creature and threw it to one side before--poor fellow!--he was struck and killed. There was no suggestion of counting upon six per cent there, was there?”

“Unless in another sphere,” interjected Caspar Green.

“Don’t be sacrilegious, Caspar,” pleaded his wife, though she added her mite to the ripple of laughter that greeted the sally.

“It was superb!--superb!” exclaimed Miss Ann Newbury, a young woman not far from thirty, with a long neck and a high-bred, pale, intellectual face. “He is one of the men who make us proud of being men and women.” She spoke with sententious earnestness and looked across the table appealingly at George Gorham.

“He left seven children, I believe?” said he, with precision.

“Yes, seven, Mr. Gorham--the eldest eleven,” answered Mrs. Lawford, who was herself the mother of five. “Poor little things!”

“I think he made a great mistake,” remarked George, laconically.

For an instant there was complete silence. The company was evidently making sure that it had understood his speech correctly. Then Miss Newbury gave a gasp, and Henry Lawford, with a certain stern dignity that he knew how to assume, said----

“A mistake? How so, pray?”

“In doing what he did--sacrificing his life to save the child.”

“Why, Mr. Gorham!” exclaimed the hostess, while everybody turned toward him. He was a young man between thirty and thirty-five, a lawyer beginning to be well thought of in his profession, with a thoughtful, pleasant expression and a vigorous physique.

“It seems to me,” he continued, slowly, seeking his words, “if John Baker had stopped to think, he would have acted differently. To be sure, he saved the life of an innocent child; but, on the other hand, he robbed of their sole means of support seven other no less innocent children and their mother. He was a brave man, I agree; but I, for one, should have admired him more if he had stopped to think.”

“And let the child be killed?” exclaimed Mr. Carter, the gentleman who had deplored so earnestly the decay of ideal considerations. He was a young mill-treasurer, with aristocratic tendencies, and a strong interest in church affairs.

“Yes, if need be. It was in danger through no fault of his. Its natural guardians had neglected it.”

“What a frightful view to take!” murmured Mrs. Green; and, although she was very well acquainted with George Gorham’s physiognomy, she examined him disapprovingly through her glass, as if there must be something compromising about it which had hitherto escaped detection.

“Well, I don’t agree with you at all,” said the host, emphatically.

“Nor I,” said Mr. Carter.

“Nor I, Mr. Gorham,” said Mrs. Lawford, plaintively conveying the impression that if a woman so ready as she to accept new points of view abandoned him there could be no chance of his being right.

“No, you’re all wrong, my dear fellow,” said Caspar Green. “Such ideas may go down among your long-haired artistic and literary friends at the Argonaut Club, but you can’t expect civilized Christians to accept them. Why, man, it’s monstrous--monstrous, by Jove!--to depreciate that noble fellow’s action--a man we all ought to be proud of, as Miss Newbury says. If we don’t encourage such people, how can we expect them to be willing to risk their lives?” Thereupon the little broker, as a relief to his outraged feelings, emptied his champagne-glass at a draught and scowled irascibly. His jesting equanimity was rarely disturbed; consequently, everybody felt the importance of his testimony.

“I’m sorry to be so completely in the minority,” said Gorham, “but that’s the way the matter strikes me. I don’t think you quite catch my point, though, Caspar,” he added, glancing at Mr. Green. At a less heated moment the company, with the possible exception of Mrs. Green, might have tacitly agreed that this was extremely probable; but now Miss Newbury, who had hitherto refrained from comment, in order to digest the problem thoroughly before speaking, came to the broker’s aid.

“It seems to me, Mr. Gorham,” she said, “that your proposition is a very plain one: you claim simply that John Baker had better not have saved the child if, in order to do so, it was necessary to lose his own life.”

“Precisely,” exclaimed Mr. Green, in a tone of some contempt.

“Was not Mr. Gorham’s meaning that, though it required very great courage to do what Baker did, a man who stopped to think of his own wife and children would have shown even greater courage?” asked Miss Emily Vincent. She was the youngest of the party, a beautiful girl, of fine presence, with a round face, dark eyes, and brilliant pink-and-white coloring. She had been invited to stay by the Lawfords because George Gorham was attentive to her; or, more properly speaking, George Gorham had been asked because he was attentive to her.

“Thank you, Miss Vincent: you have expressed my meaning perfectly,” said Gorham; and his face gladdened. He was dead in love with her, and this was the first civil word, so to speak, she had said to him during the visit.

“Do you agree with him?” inquired Miss Newbury, with intellectual sternness.

“And do you agree with Mr. Gorham?” asked Mrs. Lawford, at the same moment, caressingly.

All eyes were turned on Emily Vincent, and she let hers fall. She felt that she would give worlds not to have spoken. Why had she spoken?

“I understand what he means; but I don’t believe a man in John Baker’s place could help himself,” she said quietly.

“Of course he couldn’t!” cried Mrs. Lawford. “There, Mr. Gorham, you have lost your champion. What have you to say now?” A murmur of approval went round the table.

“I appreciate my loss, but I fear I have nothing to add to what has been said already,” he replied, with smiling firmness. “Although in a pitiful minority, I shall have to stand or fall by that.”

“Ah, but when it came to action we know that under all circumstances Mr. Gorham would be his father’s son!” said Mrs. Lawford, with less than her usual tact, though she intended to be very ingratiating. Gorham’s father, who was conspicuous for gallantry, had been killed in the Civil War.

Gorham bowed a little stiffly, feeling that there was nothing for him to say. There was a pause, which showed that the topic was getting threadbare. This prompted the host to call his wife’s attention to the fact that one of the candles was flaring. So the current of conversation was turned, and the subject was not alluded to again, thereby anticipating Mr. Carter, who, having caught Miss Newbury’s eye, was about to philosophize further on the same lines.

During the twelve months following his visit at the Lawfords’ the attentions of George Gorham to Emily Vincent became noticeable. He had loved her for three years in secret; but the consciousness that he was not able to support a wife had hindered him from devoting himself to her. He knew that she, or rather her father, had considerable property; but Gorham was not willing to take this into consideration; he would never offer himself until his own income was sufficient for both their needs. But, on the other hand, his ideas of a sufficient income were not extravagant. He looked forward to building a comfortable little house in the suburbs in the midst of an acre or two of garden and lawn, so that his neighbors’ windows need not overlook his domesticity. He would have a horse and buggy wherewith to drive his wife through the country on summer afternoons, and later, if his bank-account warranted it, a saddle-horse for Emily and one for himself. He would keep open house in the sense of encouraging his friends to visit him; and, that they might like to come, he would have a thoroughly good plain cook--thereby eschewing French kickashaws--and his library should contain the best new books, and etchings and sketches luring to the eye, done by men who were rising, rather than men who had risen. There should be no formality; his guests should do what they pleased, and wear what they pleased, and, above all, they should become intimate with his wife, instead of merely tolerating her after the manner of the bachelor friends of so many other men.

Thus he had been in the habit of depicting to himself the future, and at last, by dint of undeviating attention to his business, he had got to the point where he could afford to realize his project if his lady-love were willing. His practice was increasing steadily, and he had laid by a few thousand dollars to meet any unexpected emergency. His life was insured for fifty thousand dollars, and the policies were now ten years old. He had every reason to expect that in course of time as the older lawyers died off he would either succeed to the lucrative conduct of large suits or be made a judge of one of the higher tribunals. In this manner his ambition would be amply satisfied. His aim was to progress slowly but solidly, without splurge or notoriety, so that every one might regard him as a man of sound dispassionate judgment, and solid, keen understanding. His especial antipathy was for so-called cranks--people who went off at half-cock, who thought nothing out, but were governed by the impulse of the moment, shilly-shally and controlled by sentimentality.