Chapter X
Reading edition
I had not seen Georgy Lenox for four years when, the spring we graduated, she came to visit a cousin of her mother's in Boston, and we were all invited to an Easter-party at Mrs. Dwight's, the cards being brought to us by no less a person than Mr. Lenox himself. I was in my own room writing when I heard Harry's sweet voice calling, and I went out. Harry was, as usual, sitting on the table before his easel. It had been one of his guardian's regulations that he should not touch paints or canvas during his collegiate course, and until within the last few months he had obeyed orders, and only lately had taken to water-colors as a sort of negative course of action calculated to give him relaxation after the monotony of his unnatural deprivation, without infringing upon his uncle's injunctions. He was painting a girl in a flower-garden, and over his shoulder was gazing a shabby, jaunty, decayed-looking person, who was strangely foreign to my eyes, yet irresistibly familiar.
"Don't you remember Mr. Lenox?" asked Harry, staring at me. "Have you forgotten the pleasures of your boyhood, miserable ingrate? Have you no recollection of the big kite this benefactor of your youth made you, which dragged you down the hill and threw you into the ditch?"
"I remember all about it," said I; and indeed I had been shaking hands with my old friend all the time Harry was speaking.—"And I am delighted to see you, Mr. Lenox."
I began looking about me for a chair. In fact, finding a chair was the one trouble of our three lives, and was the only way in which we felt hospitality to be a tax upon our time. For, although we had as many chairs as the room would accommodate, they were always full of books, fruit, cigars or hats and coats. There was one arm-chair, originally covered with horsehair, which Harry called the "funeral coach:" it might have been called anything, for it was so dingy, so battered, so broken, that its raison d'être had come to be a matter of speculation. Into this seat I now inducted our visitor. He was as shabby as the funeral coach itself, but had kept up more gentility in his decay. I had not seen him for four years, and the lack of any change in his appearance surprised me. There he was, as well shaven, as threadbare, as jaunty and well-mannered, as in the old days when we used to play the siege of Troy, using an old packing-case for the wooden horse, and he was our Trojan victim. I was much impressed by my own age, and said a good deal in those days about the flight of time and the mutability of human affairs: I expected anybody who was grown up when I was young to be well stricken in years; and if Mr. Lenox had been a shrunken old man with altered aspect and a deep sense of the worthlessness of all efforts after temporalities, the change would have seemed only a reasonable one to me.
But, on the contrary, he was just the same as ever, and began talking at once about a grand coup he was going to make presently by investing in a silver-mine. He had two thousand dollars, and would buy shares at forty-nine, and be in time for the dividends of ten per cent. in July. The stock was going up like a skyrocket: a week ago you could have bought it for nineteen.
Jack had come in now, and was standing behind his future father-in-law's chair. "A skyrocket is a bad simile," he remarked. "Everybody knows what it comes down."
Mr. Lenox appeared so happy it seemed really a pity to wilt his enthusiasm: he had been beaten so many times that the prediction of failure was a familiar knell to him. But Jack had no time to waste in talk of any kind, and at once went into my room to study.
"Never mind Jack," said Harry: "he is a born croaker. I dare say the silver-mine is made of gold. How about the stock in the —— Railroad that your wife holds, Mr. Lenox?" And we both laughed at the old joke.
Mr. Lenox smiled furtively: "It was never safe to trust such a secret to scatter-brains like yourselves. But don't you know about the great defalcation? Brown, the president of the road, absconded with over a million of dollars, and they have not paid a single dividend in three years. You ought to hear my wife go on about it."
"But you have an easy time: you didn't mind Brown's embezzlement," said Harry. "What a stroke of luck for you! You can buy back your wife's ten shares at a low figure, and have a good conscience the rest of your life."
"By Jove, Harry! you have given me an idea. Just as soon as this new stock of mine gets above par I will sell out, reinvest and put the certificates in my wife's bureau-drawer. I should breathe more freely, there is no doubt of it. I confess to you, boys, it's a deuce of a life to keep a secret from a woman, she has you at such a disadvantage. Yes, on my honor, I'll buy in some of that stock: it's utterly worthless for years to come, and there must be thousands and thousands of shares of it in the market. Yes, I will do it as soon as I have made two hundred per cent. on my silver-mine. Yet it does seem a pity—" and he gave us a prudent nod—"to put money into such a broken-down concern."
"But you are as rich as Crœsus," remarked Harry, mixing his colors meanwhile. "It must be awfully jolly to take two thousand in one's pocket and go out and buy a silver-mine."
"The fact is," said Mr. Lenox confidentially, "that old Raymond has shelled out at last. I wrote to him, but he took no notice; so I induced Georgy to send a note to the little girl at The Headlands, and she somehow persuaded her grandfather to let me have three thousand dollars. He sent it in a way which robbed the courtesy of charm; but he is an old man, and for the sake of little Helen I did not repay him in kind."
"Why, what did he do?"
"Sent me his check pinned to a scrap of paper on which he had scrawled, 'A fool and his money are soon parted.' Of course I sent him my note of hand, and shall pay him as soon as possible. Do you happen to know, Floyd, anything of the ultimate disposal of his property—the terms of the old gentleman's will?"
"I know nothing whatever about it," I answered, "but have no doubt of Helen's being sole heiress. Why not? There is no other direct heir."
"I am his nephew," said Mr. Lenox with his jauntiest air. "I have no doubt of my claims or the claims of my daughter being recognized by the head of my family. By all accounts, too, Helen is a delicate child, fancifully reared and probably short-lived."
"Where do you get your information? Miss Floyd is a tall girl of fifteen now, straight as an arrow, and can out-ride and out-walk any girl I know."
"I wish her no harm," exclaimed Mr. Lenox eagerly. "I love the child as if she were my own. Georgy has always represented her as delicate and puny."
"She has not seen her for five years."
"True, true! Don't repeat what I said: you know the code of men of honor on these points, and what is said between friends is inviolate as the grave. Little Helen Floyd has been a good friend to my poor girl, who has none of Fortune's gifts. Not a month passes without a letter with an enclosure of money; and she begs Georgy to look upon her as a loving sister who is proud and glad to be of help to her in any way."
"And Miss Georgy accepts the money?" drawled Harry with a well-known look on his handsome face.
"Of course she does," responded Georgy's father with considerable heat. "Mr. Raymond ought to do anything for her. The amount of that man's income is fabulous, sir: I tell you, it is fabulous: he cannot begin to spend it. I sometimes doubt if he spends more than the interest of his income. Reflect upon his principal; what must it be!"
"Well, it's his own to do as he likes with, I suppose," said Harry, rather bored with the subject. "And I am sure you cannot complain, since you are jingling his money in your pocket this very moment. How did it happen that when Miss Georgy was at Mr. Raymond's she did not make the old gentleman take a fancy to her? She turns most people's heads."
"It was always a mystery to me," returned Mr. Lenox mournfully. "But Mr. Raymond does not like my wife, nor, I sometimes think, does he like me. The truth of the matter is, that that unlucky Hermetically-Sealed Barrel Company—"
Harry looked at me. The unlucky Hermetically-Sealed Barrel Company had been one of our old jokes at Belfield, for we had been compelled to hear its history a hundred times over. It seemed to me, in my youthful wisdom, odd and pitiful that while we had grown from boyishness into something better, leaving follies and weaknesses behind us, this man, almost thrice our age, still studied the old pages of his book, not reading them with any clearer vision than before, in spite of all his experience. Why did he not turn the leaf and take a different story? Experienced in life as I believed myself in those days, I had not learned then that we halt groping over one lesson throughout our careers. Although our harps seem tuned for the most various harmonies, we strike the same chords over and over again in hopeless iteration.
So we got him off the subject, and talked college-talk, and told him about the probable appointments for commencement. He was one of our alumni, liked our gossip, and could supplement our stories with those of the jollier days twenty-five or thirty years before. Harry and I nearly died of suppressed laughter as he gravely informed us that he had expected the valedictory, and was served badly when it was given to another. It appeared a huge joke that this seedy, broken-down man, without a person in the wide world to respect him or believe in him, could ever have been justified in any of our high hopes—could ever have stood in the places we filled now, and, like us, securely counted on winning the prizes of life.
Then he produced the little white envelopes which he had hitherto forgotten, and we read that Mrs. Dwight presented us her compliments and hoped to see us for a social gathering at her house the next Wednesday evening.
"Miss Georgy's writing," said Harry, putting his down.
"How do you know, you rascal? She certainly does not write to you usually."
"No, but she writes to a fellow I know," returned Harry, nodding toward the next room. We all abated our tones now, and talked softly about Georgy, not wishing Jack to hear. Mr. Lenox was always eloquent upon this theme. He had brought her up to town himself three days before, and the Dwights were charmed with her—could not do enough for her. She was the one success of his life, and no wonder she was precious to him. A good deal of his ready money had gone into her outfit, which must be suitable for an aristocratic house and Easter gayeties, and he had put off getting a new coat until his stock was ripe for harvest. The Dwights had not seen him, you may be sure. He knew that such people would think less of Georgy for having a seedy old father out at elbows, so he was willing to keep in the background. This very morning, however, Georgy had come out for a rendezvous in a secluded corner of the Common, and had taken rare delight in the assignation and pretended he was her lover whom she was forced to meet in secret.
"I dare say she has tripped out before to meet somebody," said Harry, who was always cynical regarding women, but especially severe where Georgy was concerned. "Girls practise those wiles on fathers and brothers, that they may do the thing neatly when a lover turns up."
"Nonsense! For the matter of that, it has sometimes seemed a little hard upon my girl that, although she is engaged to the best fellow in the world, she should have no chance to win lovers from society at large. Not but that I am glad that her future is so secure—a most fortunate match for her. I am proud when I think of it."
Well he might be proud. It is something out of the course of every-day events for a girl to possess the love of a man like Jack, whose nature combined the strongest masculine qualities with the tenderness and faithfulness of a woman. Of a woman? Strange how we use phrases which have outworn their meaning! Jack's tenderness and faithfulness were altogether without parallel.
Ellen W. Olney.