Chapter IV: Once a Scotchman, Always (2)

"And of course there was speeches. The best one, as far as I could learn, was made by the owner of the outraged premises at a late hour--when the party was breaking up--as you might put it. He said the bill would be about eighteen hundred dollars, as near as he could tell at first glance. He was greeted with hearty laughter and applause from the high-spirited young incendiaries and retired hastily through an unsuspected door to the pantry as they rushed for him. It was then they found out what to do with the rest of the catsup--and did it--so the walls and ceiling wouldn't look so monotonous, and fixed the windows so they would let out the foul tobacco smoke, and completed a large painting of the Yosemite that hung on the wall, doing several things to it that hadn't occurred to the artist in his hurry, and performed a serious operation on the piano without the use of gas. The tables, I believe, was left flat on their backs.

"Angus, _fills_, was fetched home in a car by a gang of his roguish young playmates. They stopped down on the stately drive under my window and a quartet sung a pathetic song that run:

"Don't forget your parents,
Think all they done for you!

"Then young Angus ascended the marble steps to the top one, bared his agreeable head to the moonlight, and made them a nice speech. He said the campaign now in progress, fellow-citizens, marked the gravest crisis in the affairs of our grand old state that an intelligent constituency had ever been called upon to vote down, but that he felt they were on the eve of a sweeping victory that would sweep the corrupt hell-hounds of a venal opposition into an ignominy from which they would never be swept by any base act of his while they honoured him with their suffrages, because his life was an open book and he challenged any son-of-a-gun within sound of his voice to challenge this to his face or take the consequences of being swept into oblivion by the high tide of a people's indignation that would sweep everything before it on the third day of November next, having been aroused in its might at last from the debasing sloth into which the corrupt hell-hounds of a venal opposition had swept them, but a brighter day had dawned, which would sweep the onrushing hordes of petty chicanery to where they would get theirs; and, as one who had heard the call of an oppressed people, he would accept this fitting testimonial, not for its intrinsic worth but for the spirit in which it was tendered. As for the nefarious tariff on watch springs, sawed lumber, and indigo, he would defer his masterly discussion of these burning issues to a more fitting time because a man had to get a little sleep now and then or he wasn't any good next day. In the meantime he thanked them one and all, and so, gentlemen, good-night.

"The audience cheered hoarsely and drove off. I guess the speech would have been longer if a light hadn't showed in the east wing of the castle where Angus, _peer_, slept. And then all was peace and quiet till the storm broke on a rocky coast next day. It didn't really break until evening, but suspicious clouds no bigger than a man's hand might have been observed earlier. If young Angus took any breakfast that morning it was done in the privacy of his apartment under the pitying glances of a valet or something. But here he was at lunch, blithe as ever, and full of merry details about the late disaster. He spoke with much humour about a wider use for tomato catsup than was ever encouraged by the old school of house decorators. Old Angus listened respectfully, taking only a few bites of food but chewing them long and thoughtfully. Ellabelle was chiefly interested in the names of the hearty young vandals. She was delighted to learn that they was all of the right set, and her eyes glowed with pride. The eyes of Angus, _peer_, was now glowing with what I could see was something else, though I couldn't make out just what it was. He never once exploded like you'd of thought he was due to.

"Then come a note for the boy which the perfect-mannered Englishman that was tending us said was brought by a messenger. Young Angus glanced at the page and broke out indignantly. 'The thieving old pirate!' he says. 'Last night he thought it would be about eighteen hundred dollars, and that sounded hysterical enough for the few little things we'd scratched or mussed up. I told him he would doubtless feel better this morning, but in any event to send the bill to me and I would pay it.'

"'Quite right of you,' says Ellabelle proudly.

"'And now the scoundrel sends me one for twenty-three hundred and odd. He's a robber, net!'

"Old Angus said never a word, but chewed slowly, whilst various puzzling expressions chased themselves acrost his eloquent face. I couldn't make a thing out of any of them.

"'Never patronize the fellow again,' says Ellabelle warmly.

"'As to that,' says her son, 'he hinted something last night about having me arrested if I ever tried to patronize him again, but that isn't the point. He's robbing me now.'

"'Oh, money!' says Ellabelle in a low tone of disgust and with a gesture like she was rebuking her son for mentioning such a thing before the servant.

"'But I don't like to be taken advantage of,' says he, looking very annoyed and grand. Then old Angus swallowed something he'd been chewing for eight minutes and spoke up with an entirely new expression that puzzled me more than ever.

"'If you're sure you have the right of it, don't you submit to the outrage.'

"Angus, Junior, backed up a little bit at this, not knowing quite how to take the old man's mildness. 'Oh, of course the fellow might win out if he took it into court,' he says. 'Every one knows the courts are just a mass of corruption.'

"'True, I've heard gossip to that effect,' says his father. 'Yet there must be some way to thwart the crook. I'm feeling strangely ingenious at the moment.' He was very mild, and yet there was something sinister and Scotch about him that the boy felt.

"'Of course I'd pay it out of my own money,' he remarks generously.

"'Even so, I hate to see you cheated,' says his father kindly. 'I hate to have you pay unjust extortions out of the mere pittance your tight-fisted old father allows you.'

"Young Angus said nothing to this, but blushed and coughed uncomfortably.

"'If you hurt that hotel anything like twenty-three hundred dollars' worth, it must be an interesting sight,' his father goes on brightly.

"'Oh, it was funny at the time,' says Angus boy, cheering up again.

"'Things often are,' says old Angus. 'I'll have a look.'

"'At the bill?'

"'No, at the wreck,' says he. The old boy was still quiet on the outside, but was plainly under great excitement, for he now folded his napkin with care, a crime of which I knew Ellabelle had broken him the first week in New York, years before. I noticed their butler had the fine feeling to look steadily away at the wall during this obscenity. The offender then made a pleasant remark about the beauty of the day and left the palatial apartment swiftly. Young Angus and his mother looked at each other and strolled after him softly over rugs costing about eighty thousand dollars. The husband and father was being driven off by a man he could trust in a car they had let him have for his own use. Later Ellabelle confides to me that she mistrusts old Angus is contemplating some bit of his national deviltry. 'He had a strange look on his face,' says she, 'and you know--once a Scotchman, always a Scotchman! Oh, it would be pitiful if he did anything peculiarly Scotch just at our most critical period here!' Then she felt of her face to see if there was any nervous lines come into it, and there was, and she beat it for the maid to have 'em rubbed out ere they set.

"Yet at dinner that night everything seemed fine, with old Angus as jovial as I'd ever seen him, and the meal come to a cheerful end and we was having coffee in the Looey de Medisee saloon, I think it is, before a word was said about this here injured hotel.

"'You were far too modest this morning, you sly dog!' says Angus, _peer_, at last, chuckling delightedly. 'You misled me grievously. That job of wrecking shows genius of a quality that was all too rare in my time. I suspect it's the college that does it. I shouldn't wonder now if going through college is as good as a liberal education. I don't believe mere uneducated house-wreckers could have done so pretty a job in twice the time, and there's clever little touches they never would have thought of at all.'

"'It did look thorough when we left,' says young Angus, not quite knowing whether to laugh.

"'It's nothing short of sublime,' says his father proudly. 'I stood in that deserted banquet hall, though it looks never a bit like one, with ruin and desolation on every hand as far as the eye could reach. It inspired such awe in the bereaved owner and me that we instinctively spoke in hushed whispers. I've had no such gripping sensation as that since I gazed upon the dead city of Pompeii. No longer can it be said that Europe possesses all the impressive ruins.'

"Angus boy grinned cheerfully now, feeling that this tribute was heartfelt.

"'I suspect now,' goes on the old boy, 'that when the wreckage is cleared away we shall find the mangled bodies of several that perished when the bolts descended from a clear sky upon the gay scene.'

"'Perhaps under the tables,' says young Angus, chirking up still more at this geniality. 'Two or three went down early and may still be there.'

"'Yet twenty-three hundred for it is a monstrous outrage,' says the old man, changing his voice just a mite. 'Too well I know the cost of such repairs. Fifteen hundred at most would make the place better than ever--and to think that you, struggling along to keep up appearances on the little I give you, should be imposed upon by a crook that undoubtedly has the law on his side! I could endure no thought of it, so I foiled him.'

"'How?' says young Angus, kind of alarmed.

"Angus, _peer_, yawned and got up. 'It's a long story and would hardly interest you,' says he, moving over to the door. 'Besides, I must be to bed against the morrow, which will be a long, hard day for me.' His voice had tightened up.

"'What have you done?' demands Ellabelle passionately.

"'Saved your son eight hundred dollars,' says Angus, 'or the equivalent of his own earnings for something like eight hundred years at current prices for labour.'

"'I've a right to know,' says Ellabelle through her teeth and stiffening in her chair. Young Angus just set there with his mouth open.

"'So you have,' says old Angus, and he goes on as crisp as a bunch of celery: 'I told you I felt ingenious. I've kept this money in the family by the simple device of taking the job. I've engaged two other painters and decorators besides myself, a carpenter, an electrician, a glazier, and a few proletariats of minor talent for clearing away the wreckage. I shall be on the job at eight. The loafers won't start at seven, as I used to. Don't think I'd see any son of mine robbed before my very eyes. My new overalls are laid out and my valet has instructions to get me into them at seven, though he persists in believing I'm to attend a fancy-dress ball at some strangely fashionable hour. So I bid you all good evening.'

"Well, I guess that was the first time Ellabelle had really let go of herself since she was four years old or thereabouts. Talk about the empress of stormy emotion! For ten minutes the room sounded like a torture chamber of the dark Middle Ages. But the doctor reached there at last in a swift car, and him and the two maids managed to get her laid out all comfortable and moaning, though still with outbreaks about every twenty minutes that I could hear clear over on my side of the house.

"And down below my window on the marble porch Angus, _fills_, was walking swiftly up and down for about one hour. He made no speech like the night before. He just walked and walked. The part that struck me was that neither of them had ever seemed to have the slightest notion of pleading old Angus out of his mad folly. They both seemed to know the Scotch when it did break out.

"At seven-thirty the next morning the old boy in overalls and jumper and a cap was driven to his job in a car as big as an apartment house. The curtains to Ellabelle's Looey Seez boudoir remained drawn, with hourly bulletins from the two Swiss maids that she was passing away in great agony. Angus, Junior, was off early, too, in his snakiest car. A few minutes later they got a telephone from him sixty miles away that he would not be home to lunch. Old Angus had taken his own lunch with him in a tin pail he'd bought the day before, with a little cupola on top for the cup to put the bottle of cold coffee in.

"It was a joyous home that day, if you don't care how you talk. All it needed was a crêpe necktie on the knob of the front door. That ornery old hound, Angus, got in from his work at six, spotty with paint and smelling of oil and turpentine, but cheerful as a new father. He washed up, ridding himself of at least a third of the paint smell, looked in at Ellabelle's door to say, 'What! Not feeling well, mamma? Now, that's too bad!' ate a hearty dinner with me, young Angus not having been heard from further, and fell asleep in a gold armchair at ten minutes past nine.

"He was off again next morning. Ellabelle's health was still breaking down, but young Angus sneaked in and partook of a meagre lunch with me. He was highly vexed with his pa. 'He's nothing but a scoundrelly old liar,' he says to me, 'saying that he gives me but a pittance. He's always given me a whale of an allowance. Why, actually, I've more than once had money left over at the end of the quarter. And now his talk about saving money! I tell you he has some other reason than money for breaking the mater's heart.' The boy looked very shrewd as he said this.

"That night at quitting time he was strangely down at the place with his own car to fetch his father home. 'I'll trust you this once,' says the old man, getting in and looking more then ever like a dissolute working man. On the way they passed this here yellow-haired daughter of the old train-robber that there had been talk of the boy making a match with. She was driving her own car and looked neither to right nor left.

"'Not speaking?' says old Angus.

"'She didn't see us,' says the boy.

"'She's ashamed of your father,' says the old man.

"'She's not,' says the boy.

"'You know it,' says the old scoundrel.

"'I'll show her,' says his son.

"Well, we had another cheerful evening, with Ellabelle sending word to old Angus that she wanted me to have the necklace of brilliants with the sapphire pendant, and the two faithful maids was to get suitable keepsakes out of the rest of her jewels, and would her son always wear the seal ring with her hair in it that she had given him when he was twenty? And the old devil started in to tell how much he could have saved by taking charge of the work in his own house, and how a union man nowadays would do just enough to keep within the law, and so on; but he got to yawning his head off and retired at nine, complaining that his valet that morning had cleaned and pressed his overalls. Young Angus looked very shrewd at me and again says: 'The old liar! He has some other reason than money. He can't fool me.'

"I kind of gathered from both of them the truth of what happened the next day. Young Angus himself showed up at the job about nine A.M., with a bundle under his arm. 'Where's the old man?' his father heard him demand of the carpenter, he usually speaking of old Angus as the governor.

"'Here,' says he from the top of a stepladder in the entry which looked as if a glacier had passed through it.

"'Could you put me to work?' says the boy.

"'Don't get me to shaking with laughter up here,' says the old brute. 'Can't you see I'd be in peril of falling off?'

"Young Angus undoes his bundle and reveals overalls and a jumper which he gets into quickly. 'What do I do first?' says he.

"His father went on kalsomining and took never a look at him more. 'The time has largely passed here,' says he, 'for men that haven't learned to do something, but you might take some of the burnt umber there and work it well into a big gob of that putty till it's brown enough to match the woodwork. Should you display the least talent for that we may see later if you've any knack with a putty knife.'

"The new hand had brought no lunch with him, but his father spared him a few scraps from his own, and they all swigged beer from a pail of it they sent out for. So the scandal was now complete in all its details. The palatial dining-room that night, being a copy of a good church or something from ancient Italy, smelled like a paint shop indeed--and sounded like one through dinner. 'That woodwork will be fit to second-coat first thing in the morning,' says old Angus. 'I'll have it sandpapered in no time,' says the boy. 'Your sandpapering ain't bad,' says the other, 'though you have next to no skill with a brush.' 'I thought I was pretty good with that flat one though.' 'Oh, fair; just fair! First-coating needs little finesse. There! I forgot to order more rubbing varnish. Maybe the men will think of it.' And so on till they both yawned themselves off to their Scotch Renaysence apartments. Ellabelle had not yet learned the worst. It seemed to be felt that she had a right to perish without suffering the added ignominy of knowing her son was acting like a common wage slave.

"They was both on the job next day. Of course the disgraceful affair had by now penetrated to the remotest outlying marble shack. Several male millionaires this day appeared on the scene to josh Angus, _peer_, and Angus, _fills_, as they toiled at their degrading tasks. Not much attention was paid to 'em, it appears, not even to the old train-robber who come to jest and remained to cross-examine Angus about how much he was really going to clear on the job, seriously now. Anything like that was bound to fascinate the old crook.

"And next day, close to quitting time, what happens but this here robber chieftain's petted daughter coming in and hanging round and begging to be let to help because it was such jolly fun. I believe she did get hold of a square of sandpaper with which she daintily tried to remove some fresh varnish that should have been let strictly alone; and when they both ordered her out in a frenzy of rage, what does she do but wait for 'em with her car which she made them enter and drove them to their abode like they belonged to the better class of people that one would care to know. The two fools was both kind of excited about this that night.

"The next day she breezes in again and tries to get them to knock off an hour early so she can take them to the country club for tea, but they refuse this, so she makes little putty statues of them both and drove a few nails where they would do no good and upset a bucket of paste and leaned a two-hundred-dollar lace thing against a varnished wall to the detriment of both, and fell off a stepladder. Old Angus caught her and boxed her ears soundly. And again she drove them through the avenues of a colony of fine old families with money a little bit older, by a few days, and up the drive to their own door.

"Ellabelle was peeking between the plush curtains on this occasion, for some heartless busybody during the day had told her that her son and husband was both renegades now. And strangely enough, she begun to get back her strength from that very moment--seeing that exclusive and well-known young debby-tant consorting in public with the reprobates. I'm darned if she didn't have the genius after that to treat the whole thing as a practical joke, especially when she finds out that none of them exclusives had had it long enough to look down on another millionaire merely for pinching a penny now and then. Old Angus as a matter of fact had become just a little more important than she had ever been and could have snubbed any one he wanted to. The only single one in the whole place that throwed him down was his own English valet. He was found helpless drunk in a greenhouse the third day, having ruined nine thousand dollars' worth of orchids he'd gone to sleep amongst, and he resigned his position with bitter dignity the moment he recovered consciousness.

"Moreover, young Angus and this girl clenched without further opposition. Her train-robber father said the boy must have something in him even if he didn't look it, and old Angus said he still believed the girl to be nothing but a yellow-haired soubrette; but what should we expect of a woman, after all?

"The night the job was finished we had the jolliest dinner of my visit, with a whole gang of exclusive-setters at the groaning board, including this girl and her folks, and champagne, of which Angus, _peer_, consumed near one of the cut-glass vases full.

"I caught him with young Angus in the deserted library later, while the rest was one-stepping in the Henry Quatter ballroom or dance hall. The old man had his arms pretty well upon the boy's shoulders. Yes, sir, he was almost actually hugging him. The boy fled to this gilded café where the rest was, and old Angus, with his eyes shining very queer, he grabs me by the arm and says, 'Once when he was very small--though unusually large for his age of three, mind you--he had a way of scratching my face something painful with his little nails, and all in laughing play, you know. I tried to warn him, but he couldn't understand, of course; so, not knowing how else to instruct him, I scratched back one day, laughing myself like he was, but sinking my nails right fierce into the back of his little fat neck. He relaxed the tension in his own fingers. He was hurt, for the tears started, but he never cried. He just looked puzzled and kept on laughing, being bright to see I could play the game, too. Only he saw it wasn't so good a game as he'd thought. I wonder what made me think of that, now! I don't know. Come--from yonder doorway we can see him as he dances.'

"And Ellabelle was saying gently to one and all, with her merry peal of laughter, 'Ah, yes--once a Scotchman, always--'

"My land! It's ten o'clock. Don't them little white-faced beauties make the music! Honestly I'd like to have a cot out in the corral. We miss a lot of it in here."