Chapter 5

So rapt was she in meditation that she was not aware of Bates' presence until he had stood near her for a full minute. His house-shoes enabled him to move on noiseless feet and he had never stooped to that common subterfuge of butlers, the nervous cough. He stood patiently, in silence, and Miss Ocky, when she noticed him at length, was stirred to remembrance by something in his attitude. It was just so he had used to come upon her in the old days when he was wont to bring his difficulties to her, apparently deriving comfort from her half-mocking, half-sympathetic comments.

"Well, Bates--you want to speak to me?"

"Yes, Miss Ocky, I do--and I don't."

"I understand perfectly, thanks to my exceptional cleverness and my vast knowledge of human nature. What you want to do is blow off steam--as you used to--but you are not certain that it's quite the right thing to do. Isn't that it?"

"Yes, Miss Ocky."

"Well, I can set your doubts at rest. It isn't right; and now that we've settled that," added the lady comfortably, "go ahead and blow. After a long and very virtuous life I'm beginning to think there is much to be said for crime! I can guess your secret sorrow, too."

"I'm sure you can, Miss Ocky." A faint amusement that had lighted his tired eyes at her philosophy vanished again. "You've been here two months or more, and you've seen how it is for yourself."

"Yes--I have. I tell you candidly, Bates, if I had dreamed how things were going here I would never have stayed away twenty years. I was shocked when I saw my sister--"

"That's it, Miss Ocky, that's it!" In his eagerness he was oblivious to his breach of good form in interrupting. "It's not myself I'm blowing off steam about. It's Miss Lucy. You can guess how I've felt through these years, watching her change into what she is. It has hurt me, Miss Ocky, for when all is said and done, I'm Miss Lucy's man as I was her father's before her--not Simon Varr's! You remember what she was like before you went away--always bright and happy and full of fun and singing around the house. We used to call her the Queen of Fairyland--"

"My memory is excellent, Bates. You needn't harrow me further."

"And look at her now," continued the old man relentlessly. "A poor meek woman that never dares to call her soul her own, faded and lifeless as the flowers I throw out of the vases, looking twice her age--"

"I hope she's well out of earshot, Bates."

"And it's all the fault of that man!" said the butler passionately, his eyes shining with anger and indignation and his usual careful diction sacrificed to the greater need of plain speech. "It's him that has done it with his sneerin' mockin' ways that would bring an angel to tears--his penny-savin', snivelin' meanness that grudges her every cent she spends, just as though he'd had a dollar to call his own before she lifted him out of the gutter where he belongs. 'Twould have been kinder if he had up in the beginning and struck her over the head and been done with it instead of wearin' her down to skin and bones by his naggin' and growlin' and snarlin'. And how do you think I've felt, Miss Ocky, while I stood by all these years and watched it goin' on unable to lift a finger to her help? 'Tis only once and again, when he has her near to tears at the table, that I'm able to drop a plate or joggle his elbow and him drinkin' coffee the while, and so distract his attention."

He paused for breath. Ordinarily Miss Ocky would have been vastly entertained by this sketch of Simon's attention being distracted, but she was in no mood for amusement at the moment. Her eyes were hard, and if she deliberately kept her comments pitched on a semi-humorous note, it was more to pacify and soothe the old butler than anything else.

"I gather you don't care for Mr. Varr," she said.

"Does any one, Miss Ocky?" he retorted more calmly.

"You used a curious expression a moment since," she said, ignoring a question she deemed purely rhetorical. "You spoke of yourself as 'Miss Lucy's man.' Just what did you mean, Bates? I know you don't use words just because you like the sound of them."

"You don't miss anything, do you, Miss Ocky?"

His set face softened as he regarded her with a look almost of affection. "No, you were never one to miss anything! I'll tell you what I meant, though I've never breathed a word of it even to Miss Lucy, bless her!"

"There are a lot of things you could tell me," said Miss Ocky, "and I hope some day you will. Go ahead with this one, first."

"It dates back. I could make a long story of it, but I won't. You might say it goes back to the time I took service with your father and mother. I was in trouble, mortal trouble, when they took me in, Miss Ocky, and they gave me a home and comfort and--and security. That last is a great thing in a hard world, as I guess you know. The only way I could repay them was by being a 'good and faithful servant,' as the Bible puts it, and I had reason to believe that they both came to be glad of the day they showed kindness to a less fortunate human."

"What was your trouble?" she asked quietly, for this was her first intimation that his advent to the household had been marked by anything out of the ordinary. "My father never mentioned it."

"He wouldn't--and it doesn't belong with what I've started to tell you now, Miss Ocky." He glanced at her apologetically. "I'm telling you how I know they were glad to have me. When your mother was dying, Miss Ocky, she had me called in for a word with her. She thanked me for the service I'd given and said she hoped I would always stay with your father as long as he needed me--'which will be to the day of his death,' she said.

"The same thing happened when his time came. I was in and out of his room a dozen times a day while he was ill, and once he stopped me and told me a few things he had on his mind.

"'It's a queer thing, Bates,' he said. 'Here I am dying with scarce a relative to my name, and I'm leaving two daughters to face the world alone. They'll have money, but they won't have an older person to help them over the rough places.' I could see he was worried. 'Of course,' he said, 'Miss Lucy is going to marry that young fellow, Varr. I'm not so fond of him as she is, though I've nothing against him that would stop the match. It's her I'm thinking about. She will have this house when I'm gone and she is married--and I want her to have you.' Well, Miss Ocky, to tell you the truth I started to say something about hoping that _you_ would set up housekeeping and find a place for me, but he wouldn't listen to me for a minute. You know how quick he was. 'I'm competent to judge my own children!' he snapped at me. 'Ocky can stand on her own two legs as long as she has 'em and will get along nicely on crutches after that. It's Lucy that may need help.' He looked at me very sharp--you have his eyes, Miss Ocky. 'I'm a dying man and this is the last thing I'll ever ask of you,' he said. 'I don't pretend that you owe me anything, but I'll ask you as a favor to promise me you'll always stand by Miss Lucy.'

"There couldn't be two answers to that. I promised."

"And you've kept your promise faithfully. You've stood by."

"That's all I have done, though," grumbled the old servant morosely. His troubled gaze sought hers. "I've just--stood by."

"Well, you couldn't very well do more. I think it is greatly to your credit that you didn't leave the house long ago."

"I've been tempted often enough, Miss Ocky, but there's been the thought in the back of my head that some day I might really be able to help Miss Lucy in an hour of need." His hands closed nervously. "But for that I'd have left, no fear! I've stood so much from him that now I _hate_ him! Do you know, Miss Ocky," his voice dropped to awed confession, "when he was so sick of pneumonia awhile back I just hoped and hoped and hoped our troubles were near an end!"

"It would have been more practical to have left a window open on him, but I suppose the nurse would have stopped that." Miss Ocky's voice was an amused drawl. "Did you try prayer, Bates?"

"_Prayer_! Good gracious, no, Miss Ocky!"

"It's effective sometimes." She seemed to muse. "Of course, if you were only practiced in witchcraft you could make a wax image of him and then stick pins in it until he curled up and died--"

"Good gracious, Miss Ocky, but you've brought back some terrible ideas from those foreign parts!" He was smiling, now, to show that he had caught her mood and understood she was poking fun at him. The ceremony of the blowing off of steam was nearly concluded. "If you ask me, I don't believe that even witchcraft could hurt Simon Varr. It was only the other day I heard him tell Miss Lucy that he'd increased his life insurance and that the doctor had told him he was good for a century-mark."

"Humph!" There was about her the air of one whose hopes have just been rudely dashed. Then her face brightened and she added with determined cheerfulness. "Never mind, Bates--you'd be amazed if you knew how often doctors are wrong!"

"I hope you're right, Miss Ocky!"

"Suppose we drop the subject for the time. If you will look in the sitting-room you'll find a book on the table called 'The Court of the Borgias.' Bring it to me, please. I think a little quiet reading will settle my thoughts after our conversation."

He went off smiling to get the volume, and presently returned with it. He lingered to produce a match for the cigarette she took from a stand beside her.

"Thank you for listening to me, Miss Ocky."

"And thank you, Bates, for telling me what you did about father. I am glad he had confidence in my ability to take care of myself, and that he wasn't worrying over me when he had so much else to think about."

"I wish Simon Varr was more like him!" said Bates.

She made no reply to that, and he withdrew in his noiseless fashion. She did not immediately dip into the sedative history of the Borgias, but remained looking at the corner around which he had vanished with something akin to speculative interest. She was pondering the old man's revelation of his hatred for Varr and the curious glint she had caught in his eye at dinner the night before. It would be amusing, she thought, if Bates instead of handing Simon the carving-knife should sometime so far forget himself as to slip it between his master's shoulders.

Amusing was the word she used to herself; perhaps, as the butler had suggested, she had brought home some terrible ideas from the East--ideas about Kismet and fatalism and the cheapness of human life in comparison to human good. Wrong ideas, from the point of view of the queer, drab, cramped and hypocritical Occidental mind.

She contemplated the Occidental mind briefly, then dismissed it as a negligible quantity and settled to her book.

_VI: An Aunt in Need_

It was very nearly dinner-time before Copley Varr came back from his talk with Sheila Graham. In deference to a hint from her that the course of true love could not run smooth that afternoon in the vicinity of her father, they had taken a long walk over the hills along quiet country roads where hands could touch unseen by alien eyes. They were happy, but rather nervously so, with something of the nervousness of a young colt about to kick over the traces for the first time and who is a little uncertain about the consequences.

One bit of their afternoon was devoted to a ramble around the grounds of a small, vacant house, whose exterior they viewed and discussed from every possible angle. It stood in the center of a wooded ten-acre tract, a long mile by winding road from Simon Varr's house but not a quarter of that distance from it as a plane flies. It was situated, in fact, at the bottom of the very hill on which Simon's home flaunted its greater magnificence, and it had once formed part of the property until severed from it by the elder Copley's will.

They tried the front and back door, but finding them quite naturally locked they made no further effort to effect an entrance. They contented themselves with strolling around it once again, admiring its shingles that were weather-beaten to a silvery gray, enthusing over the quaintly-gabled windows of its upper story, calling each other's attention to its palpable solidity of structure.

"A few hundred dollars spent on these grounds!" cried Sheila, her cheeks flushed, her blue eyes shining. "Coppie, isn't it a _love_ of a place? Did you ever in your life see a nicer?"

Coppie admitted freely that he never had.

It was for reasons directly connected with this desirable country property that he sought audience of his aunt immediately upon his return home. She was not to be found anywhere downstairs, and since his impatience did not welcome the idea of waiting for a fortuitous opportunity to chat with her in private, he took the stairs three at a time and rapped eagerly on the door of her bedroom.

This was presently opened to him by a tall, bony, angular woman of fifty-odd who regarded him not altogether favorably through steel-rimmed spectacles. This was Janet Mackay, whom the prosaic-minded would have designated a lady's-maid, but who had risen from that humble position to be no less than Chancellor of State to her sovereign majesty, Miss Ocky. The two women had shared the ups-and-downs, the sunshine and shadow, of that mystic, colorful Orient through whose extent the restless curiosity of the younger had led them to and fro. Out there the line between mistress and servant had inevitably been supplanted by the bond of companionship; but when they returned to the more humdrum civilization of the western world, it was Janet whose dour Scotch rectitude had re-established the distinction. She took her meals with old Bates at a little table in the butlery, found her chief relaxation in the one motion-picture house that Hambleton boasted, and for the rest, "kept herself _to_ herself."

"Hello, Janet!" he greeted her. "Is my aunt in there? Ask her if I can come in and speak to her."

The woman drew aside in the doorway as Miss Ocky answered for herself.

"That you, Copley? Come in. I'm out on the veranda. Janet, you needn't wait."

Miss Ocky's bedroom, like all the others on the upper floor, had a small private balcony outside its tall French windows that made a pleasant place to draw a comfortable chair in the late afternoon or the cool of the evening. She was sitting there now and called to him to bring a chair for himself, but he preferred to lounge against the heavy wooden rail of the balcony.

"Well, Romeo! I expect affairs have been marching with you and Juliet or you wouldn't be hunting me up so promptly."

"See here, Aunt Ocky, I'm just tickled pink and all that, but are you sure you ought to have done it?"

"Suggested the elopement?"

"N-no, of course not. That's all right. That's lovely. We are going to take your advice and grab our happiness. What I'm fussing about is the house business."

"Yes, you'd find something to fuss about, wouldn't you! I didn't encounter any such obstinacy in Sheila, but women are much more practical than men in every respect. When I told her I owned that particular property and proposed to settle it on you jointly as a wedding-gift, she yelped with joy. It's true that after that she began to make polite gestures of remonstrance, but the yelp came first by a good, wide margin! I'm glad one of you has some common-sense."

"I'm just as grateful as I can be, but--"

"Really, Copley, you're a downright nuisance. Let me tell you something, my child. I've a great deal more money than your mother or you or any one else around here has any idea of. I've made investments in my time that would have turned a banker's hair gray, and never one of them but brought me huge returns. That property is of negligible value to me--how negligible you don't know--and yet it will be very valuable to you and Sheila as a haven of security that you can call your own. As a rich aunt, I have every legal and moral and ethical right to give it to you--and as a poor but deserving nephew, it is your cue to say 'Thank you' and accept."

"You're a brick, Aunt Ocky," said the young man soberly, for the second time that afternoon. "Sheila spoke of a check for a thousand--"

"For your honeymoon. If you don't splurge too hard, there'll be some of it left for initial expenses."

"You bet there will." He drew a long breath. "Thank you, Aunt Ocky," he said obediently. "I accept. But, look here--there'll be a holy row when my father hears what you've done. He'll want your head on a charger!"

"Better men than he have wanted that--and it's still neatly articulated to the end of my spinal column!" She gave a low, reminiscent chuckle. "There was a Chinese general, once, whom it was my privilege to annoy, and he went so far as to put quite a flattering price on it. He lost his own! Shall I tell you the story?"

He eagerly assented, and the gory narrative of the unlucky Chinese head-hunter occupied them until dinner was announced.

It was scarcely to be wondered at that Copley was exuberantly cheerful during the meal. His aunt might really have succeeded in her wish to graft a bit of her nerve on to his backbone, for he felt a new sense of self-reliance and resolution. Once married to Sheila, and with the immediate future provided for by the generosity of Miss Ocky, he had no doubt of his ability to pluck a pearl necklace from the world that was his oyster! He knew quite a bit about the tanning business, a knowledge acquired casually during summer vacations, and he also knew--from Sheila--something of Graham's disappointed ambitions in respect to a partnership, if his prospective father-in-law elected to seek his fortune in another field, there was no reason why he shouldn't hitch his wagon to Graham's star as Graham had once hitched his to Varr's. The golden sun of finance was rising in the East for him, and he and Sheila, hand in hand, would walk into the dawn--

So ran his thoughts, and between them he kept up a flow of badinage with Ocky, rallied his quiet mother into some show of life, and even directed a few flippancies at the glum figure which graced the head of the table. The tanner was taciturn, abstracted, and the only show of emotion registered by his wooden countenance was a flash of uneasiness when Copley made some casual reference to Leslie Sherwood. Miss Ocky did not miss that, and again she wondered what lay behind.

His son's airiness of manner distinctly jarred on Simon. A young man just bereft of his allowance and under orders to renounce his lady-love had no right to act like that. It wasn't natural--or else he had something up his youthful sleeve. Humph. That might bear looking into!

"What are you going to do this evening, Copley?" he demanded, as he returned the quill toothpick to his pocket and rose from table.

"Nothing special, sir. Read a while and turn in early."

"I'm going to be busy with some work for an hour or so. I wish you would come to my study at nine. Want to talk to you."

Copley's heart sank as he nodded acquiescence. Then it rose again, for his eyes had strayed across to Miss Ocky and the sight of his powerful ally braced his courage--just as Simon, the day before, had gained fresh confidence from the glimpse of a cabbage. Nothing could harm him while Aunt Ocky held up his arm!

Punctually at nine o'clock he passed through the living-room on his way to the appointment, and paused for a word with Ocky, who was reading by the lamp in the center of the room. She had checked him with a gesture.

"What does he want to see you about?"

"I don't know. Just a snappy laying down of the laws of the Medes and the Persians, I expect."

"Well, don't quarrel with him!"

"You mean--he's my father, after all? Right. It takes two to make a quarrel anyway."

"The most ridiculous aphorism ever coined! I've made lots of them myself, single-handed. And it was policy, not filial respect, that dictated my caution. If you quarrel, you'll lose your temper; if you lose your temper, you may let something slip that will reveal your plans."

"Yours is the sapience of the serpent! But what could he do if he did know the truth? We're both of age."

"Just the same, it's a good generalship to avoid risks. I have learned to leave little to chance."

"Aunt Ocky, will you come and live with us when we are really settled? I've an idea I could profit a lot if I sat at your knees for a while!"

"I wish I could accept your invitation," Miss Ocky answered gravely. Her eyes left his face and seemed to shield her thoughts behind a film of blankness. "I'm afraid I have other--plans," she added quietly. "It's after nine--don't get the habit of unpunctuality."

He knocked on the study door at the end of the room, and closed it after him when he had entered in response to a gruff command.

For some little time Miss Ocky tried to center her thoughts on her book, lifting her head to listen now and again as she paused in her reading to cut pages with her two-edged souvenir of Teheran. The conversation in the study appeared to be flowing along smoothly. She could not catch any words, nor did she try to; a shrewd listener can glean a good deal merely by interpreting the vocal tones of the different speakers. Her ear told her that Simon was certainly laying down the law but with no more than his usual acidity, and that his son was pleading his cause patiently and without acrimony. It was natural enough that he should hope up to the eleventh hour for a favorable change in his father's attitude, a foolish hope but a pardonable one--

Abruptly, Miss Ocky's ear cocked itself to a more alert angle. The voices in the study had suddenly altered. Simon had said something in his usual dictatorial accents, and Copley, instead of the soft answer that turneth away wrath, had snapped a crisp rejoinder in louder tones than any he had yet used. For a minute the two men were speaking at once, discharging verbal salvos at point-blank range. Miss Ocky shrugged her shoulders and smiled rather scornfully to herself. She was not surprised. Lucy had told her of Copley's youthful flashes of temper, which still persisted, though he had learned in some measure to control them.

She was trying to guess the probable outcome of the battle of words when her thoughts were interrupted from another quarter. The bell of the front door had rung violently, and Bates hurried from the pantry and along the hallway to answer it. Miss Ocky wondered who in the world could be calling at such an hour.

She knew in a moment. There was the briefest of parleys with the butler, and then, through the door of the living-room, she saw two men hurry rearward through the hall in the direction of the study. Evidently they proposed to present themselves before Varr without the formality of announcing themselves through Bates.

The first of the two she recognized instantly--it was Graham, the manager of the tannery, whom she had met several times. And he was Sheila's father! An awkward occasion for him to appear! The second man she did not know at all. He was smaller and slighter than Graham, a pale, anaemic creature. He lagged behind his companion, and as the latter kept a grip on his arm as they proceeded, he gave the effect of a lamb going reluctantly to the sacrifice.

Graham's face had been deeply flushed--so much she had had time to note as he swept past the open door. She heard him knock at the study--from sheer force of habit, no doubt, as he could not have waited for a summons to enter before flinging back the door. His voice carried clear to Miss Ocky's ear as he swiftly took up some remark he had caught from within.

"That will do, young man! I can fight my own battles with no help from you--!"