Chapter IV: Part 4

That, with a funny story or two, was the gist of it; but delivered in a low, richly vibrating voice, audible in every corner of the room and addressed directly and earnestly to the two candidates, its effect was not unlike that of Whitfield’s dying man preaching to dying men. All the scarred, haunted faces, behind each of which there lurked memories blacker than those of the madhouse, were turned toward the speaker raptly. Knowledge of their own hearts and knowledge of his gave the words a power and a value beyond anything they carried on the surface. The red-hot experience of a hundred and fifty men was poured molten into the minute, to give to the promises the two postulants were presently called on to make a kind of iron vigor.

Those promises were simple. Colin MacPherson and Tapley Toms took the total-abstinence pledge for a week, after which they would be asked to renew it for similar periods till they felt strong enough to take it for a month. They would remain as residents of the club till morally re-established, but they would look for work, in which the club would assist them, and send at least three-quarters of their earnings to their wives. As soon as they were strong enough they would set up homes for their families again, and try to atone for their failure in the mean time. They would do their best to strengthen other members of the club, and to live in peace with them. The religious question was shelved by asking each man to give his word to reconnect himself with the church in which he had been brought up.

The promises exacted of the next friends were, as became veterans, more severe. They were to be guardians of the most zealous activity, and shrink from no insult or injury in the exercise of their functions. If their charges fell irretrievably away, their brothers in the club would be sorry for them, even though the guilt would not be laid at their door.

When some twenty or thirty members had renewed their vows for a third or fourth or fifth week, as the case happened to be, the meeting broke up for refreshments.

It was during this finale to the evening that Coningsby brought up a man somewhat of his own type, and yet different. He was different in that, though of the same rank and age, he was tall and dark, and carried himself with a slight stoop of the shoulders. An olive complexion touched off with well-rounded black eyebrows and a neat black mustache made one take him at first for a foreigner, while the dreaminess of the dark eyes was melancholy and introspective, if not quite despondent.

“Melbury, I want you to know Doctor Cantyre, who holds the honorable office of physician in ordinary to the club.”

Once more I was in conversation with a man of antecedents similar to my own, and once more the breaking of the ice was that between men accustomed to the same order of associations. In this case we found them in Cantyre’s tourist recollections of Montreal and Quebec, and his enjoyment of winter sports.

_CHAPTER VI_

There was nothing more than this to the meeting that night, but early the next afternoon I was called to the telephone. As such a summons was rare in the club, I went to the instrument in some trepidation.

“Hello! This is Frank Melbury.”

“This is Doctor Cantyre. You remember that we met last evening?”

“Oh, rather!”

“I’m motoring out in my runabout to see a patient who lives a few miles up the river, and I want you to come along.”

The invitation, which would mean nothing to you but a yes or a no, struck me almost speechless. There was first the pleasure of it. I have not laid stress on the fact that the weather was sickeningly hot, because it didn’t enter into our considerations. We were too deeply concerned with other things to care much that the house was stifling; and yet stifling it was. But more important than that was the fact that any one in the world should want to show me this courtesy. Remember that I had been beyond the reach of courtesies. A drink from some one who would expect me to give him a drink in return was the utmost I had known in this direction for months, and I might say for years.

Is it any wonder that in my reply I stammered and stuttered and nearly sobbed?

“Oh, but, I say, I—I look too beastly for an expedition of—of that sort. I’m awfully sorry, but—but I—well, you know how it is.”

“Oh, get out! You’ve got to have the air. I’m your doctor. I’m not going to see you cooped up there day after day in weather like this. Besides, I’m bringing along a couple of dust-coats—the roads will be dusty part of the way—and we shall both be covered up. Expect me by half past two.”

As he put up the receiver without waiting for further protests, there was nothing for me but submission.

“I’ve been ’ere as long as you ’ave,” Lovey complained when I told him of my invitation, “and nobody don’t ask me to go hout in no automobiles.”

“Oh, but they will.”

He shook his head.

“Them swells’ll take you away, sonny. See if they don’t.”

“Not from you, Lovey.”

He grabbed me by the arm.

“Will you promise me that, Slim?”

“Yes, Lovey; I promise you.”

“And we’ll go on being buddies, even when the rich guys talks to you about all them swell things?”

“Yes, Lovey. We’re buddies for life.”

With this Mizpah between us he released my arm and I was able to go and make my preparations.

In spite of the heat and the fact that on a windless day there was no dust to speak of, Cantyre was buttoned up in a dust-coat. It would have seemed the last word in tact if he hadn’t gone further by pretending to be occupied in doing something to the steering-wheel while I hid my seedy blue serge in the long linen garment he handed me out. As even an old golf-cap can look pretty decent, I was really like anybody else by the time I had snuggled myself in by his side.

During the first mile or two of the way I could hardly listen to Cantyre, to say nothing of making conversation. In spasmodic sentences between his spells of attention to the traffic he told me of his patient and where she lived; but as it was nothing I was obliged to register in my mind, I could give myself to the wonder of the occasion, in awe at the miracle which had restored me to something like my old place in the world at the very moment when I seemed farthest away from it. Here I was, with not a penny to my name and not two coats to my back, tooling along like a gentleman with a gentleman, and as a man with his friend. Moreover, here I was with a new revelation, a convincing revelation, of something I had long since ceased to believe—that in this world there was such a thing as active brotherly kindness.

I came out of these thoughts to find that we were following the avenue with part of which I had made myself so familiar ten days before. I began to ask myself if Cantyre had a motive in bringing me this way. The houses were thinning out. Vacant lots became frequent. I noted the southern limit of my pacings up and down on that strange midnight. Cantyre slowed the pace perceptibly. My heart thumped. If he accused me of anything, I was resolved to confess all.

As we passed one particular vacant lot, a tangle of nettle, fireweed, and blue succory, I noticed that Cantyre’s gaze roamed round about it, to the neglect of the machine. We had slowed down to perhaps ten miles an hour.

“Do you know whose house that is?” he asked, suddenly.

But I refused to betray myself before it was necessary.

“Whose?” I riposted.

“Sterling Barry, the architect’s.”

The machine almost stopped. He looked the façade up and down, saying, as he did so: “It’s closed for the season. They left town a few days ago. Barry’s bought the old Hornblower place at Rosyth, Long Island.”

To my relief, we sped on again; but I was not long in learning the motive behind his interest.

Chiefly for the sake of not seeming dumb, I said, as we got into the country, “You and Ralph Coningsby are by way of being great friends, aren’t you?”

“No,” he replied, promptly. “I see him when I go to the club; not very often elsewhere. I know his sister, Elsie Coningsby, better. Not that I know her very well. She happens to be a great friend of—of a—of a great friend—or, rather, some one who was a great friend—of mine. That’s all.”

So that was it!

I said, after we had spun along some few miles more, “Your name is Stephen, isn’t it?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

I hedged. “Oh, I must have heard some one call you that.”

“That’s funny. Hardly any one does. They mostly say Cantyre—or just doctor.” He added, after a minute or two, “You call me Stephen, and I’ll call you Frank.”

Once more the swift march of happenings gave me a slight shock.

“Oh, but we hardly know each other.”

“That would be true if there weren’t friendships that outdistance acquaintanceships.”

“Oh, if you look at it that way—”

“That’s the way it strikes me.”

“But, good Heavens! man, think of what—of what I am!”

His gaze was fixed on the stretch of road ahead of him.

“What’s that got to do with it? It wouldn’t make any difference to me if you were a murderer or a thief.”

“How do you know I’m not?” I couldn’t help asking.

“I don’t know that you’re not; but I say it wouldn’t make any difference to me if you were.”

The word I am tempted to use of myself at this unexpected offer of good-will is flabbergasted. I am not emotional; still less am I sentimental; both in sentiment and emotion my tendency is to go slow.

After a brief silence I said: “Look here! Do you go round making friends among the riffraff of mankind?”

“I don’t go round making friends among people of any sort. I’m not the friendly type. I know lots of people, of course; but—but I don’t get beyond just knowing them.”

“Is that because you don’t want to?”

“Not altogether. I’m a—I’m a lonesome sort of bloke. I never was a good mixer; and when you’re not that, other fellows instinctively close up their ranks against you and shut you out. Not that that matters to me. I hardly ever see a lot with whom I should want to get in. You’re—you’re an exception.”

“And for Heaven’s sake, why?”

“Oh, for two or three reasons—which I’m not going to tell you. One of these days you may find out.”

We left the subject there and sped along in silence.

This, then, was the man Regina Barry had turned down; and, notwithstanding his kindness to myself, I could understand her doing it. For a high-spirited girl such as she evidently was he would have been too melancholy. “Very nice” was what she had called him, and very nice he was; but he lacked the something thoroughly masculine that means more to women than to men. Men are used to the eternal-feminine streak in themselves and one another; but women put up with it only when it is like a flaw in an emerald, noticeable to the expert, but to no one else.

I asked him how he came to be what Coningsby called physician in ordinary to the club.

“By accident. Rufus Legrand asked me to go over and see what I could do for a bad case of D. T.”

“He’s the rector of the church opposite, isn’t he?”

“Yes, and an awfully good sort. Only parson I know who thinks more of God than he does of a church. I shouldn’t be surprised if one of these days he got the true spirit of religion.”

“What’s that?”

“What they’re doing at the Down and Out.”

“Oh, but they skip religion there altogether.”

“They don’t skip religion; they only skip the word—and for a reason.”

“What reason?”

“The reason that it’s been so misapplied as to have become nearly unintelligible. If you told the men at the club that such and such a thing was religion they’d most of ’em kick like the deuce; but when they get the thing without explanation they take to it every time. But you were asking me about my connection with the club. It began four years ago, when they first got into Miss Smedley’s house. Fellow had the old-fashioned horrors—bad. As I’d been making dipsomania a specialty Legrand railroaded me in, and there I’ve stayed.”

When we drew up at the gate of an old yellow mansion standing in large grounds Cantyre left me in the machine while he went in to visit his patient. The blue-green hills were just beginning to veil themselves in the diaphanous mauve of afternoon, and between them the river with its varied life flowed silently and rapidly. It was strange to me to remember that a short time ago I had been wishing myself under it, and that this very water would be washing the oozy, moss-grown piles of Greeley’s Slip.

_CHAPTER VII_

No later than that evening my life took still another step.

A little before nine, just as I was about to go to bed—our hours at the club were early—Ralph Coningsby dropped in for a word with me. I happened to be at the foot of the stairs in the hall when Spender admitted him, and he refused to come farther inside.

“Been dining with my wife’s father and mother over the way,” he said, in explanation of his dinner jacket and black tie, “and just ran across to say something while I was in the neighborhood. You said last night you’d come and see the Grace Memorial with me.”

“If you say so,” I smiled, “I suppose I must have; but it’s the first time to my knowledge that I ever heard of it.”

“Oh, that’s the bit of work I told you about—the thing I’m doing on my own. It’s over here at St. David’s. You see, when Charlie Grace died he left a sum of money to build and endow this institution in memory of his father.”

I smiled again.

“I know I must have heard the name of Charlie Grace, but it seems to have slipped my memory. All the same—”

“I’ll tell you about him to-morrow. I merely want to say now that I’ll look in about ten in the morning, and take you across the street—”

The difficulty I had had to confront in the afternoon was before me again.

“I don’t know about that, Coningsby. The fact is I’m not—Well, hang it all! Can’t you see? I haven’t a rag in the world but what I stand up in, and I can’t go where I’m likely to run into decent people.”

“You won’t run into any one but carpenters and painters. I’m not going to take no for an answer, old chap. Besides, there’s method in this madness, for—now don’t buck!—for I’m going to put you on a job.”

I could only stare vacantly.

“On a job?”

“Mrs. Grace wants some measurements and specifications which she thinks I haven’t given her exactly enough; and the first thing to be done is to go over the whole blooming place with a foot-rule and a tape-measure; but I’ll tell you about that to-morrow, too. For a chap with your training it will be office-boy’s work; but as you’re doing nothing else for the moment—”

It is needless to say that I hardly slept that night. It was not the prospect of work alone that excited me; it was that of being gradually drawn into the sphere in which I might meet Regina Barry. I was still uncertain as to whether I wanted to do that or not. There was no hour of the day when I didn’t think of her, and yet it was always with a sense of thankfulness that she couldn’t know where I was or guess at what had become of me. If I could have been granted the privilege of seeing her without having her see me I should have jumped at it; but the ordeal of her recognition was beyond my strength to face. Rather than have her say with her eyes, “You were the man who came into my room and tried to rob me,” I would have shot myself.

And yet I had to admit the fact that this danger was in the air. Ralph Coningsby’s sister was the Elsie of that tragic night; Cantyre was the Stephen. I was being offered work by Sterling Barry’s partner, and might soon be doing it for Sterling Barry himself. The fatality that brought about these unfoldings might go farther still, and before I knew it I might find myself in the precise situation that filled me with terror—and yet made me shiver with a kind of harsh delight. Before I could sleep I had to make a compromise with my courage. I would not shoot myself rather than meet her. I would meet her first, if it had to be. I would take that one draft of the joy I had put forever out of reach—and shoot myself afterward.

But in the morning I was more self-confident. Having examined myself carefully in the cracked mirror in the bath-room, I found that my mustache, which had grown tolerably long and thick, changed my appearance not a little. Moreover, food, rest, and sobriety had smoothed away the unspeakable haggardness that had creased my forehead, hardened my mouth, and burnt into my eyes that woebegone desolation which I had noticed among my companions when I arrived at the club. It is no exaggeration to say that I was not only younger by ten years, but that I was changed in looks, as a landscape is changed when, after being swept by rains, it is bathed in sunshine. The one hope I built on all this was that, were I to meet Regina Barry face to face, she would not recognize me at a first glance, while I could keep her from getting a second.

On the way across the street Coningsby told me something of Charlie Grace and his memorial. He had been the son of a former rector of St. David’s—an important man in the New York of his day, who had outlived his usefulness and been asked to resign his parish. The son had never forgiven this slight, and the William Grace Memorial was intended to avenge it. It had been the express desire of the widow, Mrs. Charlie Grace, that he, Ralph Coningsby, should have sole charge of the building, and the work had been going on since the previous autumn. In the coming autumn the house would be ready for furnishing. It was for this purpose that Mrs. Grace required the exact measurements of each room, with the disposition of the wall spaces. During the summer she could thus consider what she would have to do when the time came in October.

Only a corner of the new building was visible from Vandiver Street, the main entrance being on Blankney Place, which was a parallel thoroughfare. Standing in the middle of the grass-plot in front of the dumpy, spurious 1840 Gothic rectory, we had the length of the dumpy, spurious 1840 Gothic church in front of us. The memorial had to be fitted in behind the chancel, on the space formerly occupied by a Sunday-school room. This space had been enlarged by the purchase of the lot in Blankney Place, giving an entry from a more populous neighborhood. The purpose of the memorial had been more or less dictated by Mrs. Ralph Coningsby, who, as Esther Legrand, the rector’s daughter, had from her childhood upward worked among the people round about and knew their needs. As far as I could gather, it was to be a sort of neighborhood club, with parlors, reading-rooms, playing-rooms, a dancing-room, a smoking-room, a billiard-room, a lecture-room, a gymnasium, baths, and so on, and open to those who were properly enrolled, of both sexes and all ages. Of the committee in charge Mrs. Coningsby was apparently the moving spirit, though Mrs. Grace was reserving to herself the pleasure of fitting the house up.

Before going inside we discussed the difficulties of harmonizing a modern building with the efforts of the early nineteenth century, and I had an opportunity to commend Coningsby’s judgment. He had kept to the brownstone of the church and rectory, and had suggested their spirit while working on sober, well-proportioned lines.

In the middle of this I broke off to say: “Look here, old chap! I hope you’re not inventing this job of yours just for the sake of giving me something to do.”

His frank gaze convinced me.

“Honest, I’m not. Mrs. Grace is particularly anxious to have the measurements sent down to her at Rosyth, and we’re so short-handed—”

“Then that’s all right. Let’s go in, and you can show me what I’m to do.”

As Coningsby had said, it was office-boy’s work, but it suited me. It was a matter of getting broken in again, and—whether it came by accident or my friend’s good-heartedness—an easy job in which there was no thinking or responsibility was the most effective means that could have been found of nursing me along. At the end of a week I was treated to the well-nigh incredible wonder of a check.

Early on a Sunday morning I took it to Christian, asking that it should be turned in toward my expenses at the club.

Having read its amount, he held it in his fingers, twisting it and turning it.

“You see, Frank,” he said, after thinking for a minute, “the primary object of the club is not to be paid for what it spends—though that is an object—it’s to help fellows to get on their feet. Of you nineteen chaps who are in the house at present twelve are regularly paying for their board and lodging, and that pretty well carries us along. If there’s a deficit it’s covered by the back payments of men who’ve gone out and who are making up. So that this isn’t pressing for the minute—”

“But I should like to pay it, sir.”

“Yes, of course; but it’s a question of what is most urgent. Now this isn’t urgent; we can extend your credit; whereas, the first bit of bluff we’ve all got to put up when we’re pulling ourselves together is in clothes.”

He asked me how long my present job would go on. I said for about three weeks.

“Then keep this check,” he pursued, handing it back to me, “till you get as much again. That will be enough to turn you out quite smart. Go to Straight, at Bruch Brothers—all our fellows go to him—and he’ll advise you to the best advantage.”

The words were accompanied by such a smile that I, who am not emotional, felt my eyes smart.

_CHAPTER VIII_

The summer passed with no more than two or three other incidents worth the jotting down.

In the first place, the day arrived when I had to make up my mind either to leave the club or to join it. Expecting some opposition from Lovey as to joining it, I was surprised to find him take the suggestion complacently.

“I’ve found out,” he whispered to me, “that yer can jine this club—and fall. Yer can fall three times before they’ll turn ye out.”

“Oh, but you wouldn’t want to fall in cold blood.”

“Well,” he muttered, doubtfully, “I ain’t partic’lar about the blood. Now my hadvice’d be this: ’Ere we are in July. That’s all right; we can jine. Then in Haugust we can ’ave a wee little bit of a fall—just two or three days like. We can do the same in September; and the same in Hoctober. That’ll use up our three times, and we can come back under cover for the worst months of the winter. We can’t fall no more after that; but in the spring we can try somethink else. There’s always things.”

“And suppose I don’t mean to fall?”

He looked hurt.

“Oh, if you can keep straight without me—”

“But if I can’t, Lovey? If I must keep straight and need you to help me?”

He clasped his hands against his stomach and drew a dismal face.

“That’d be a tight place for me.”

“And isn’t there,” I continued, “another point of view? Suppose we did what you suggest, do you think it would be treating all these nice fellows decently?”

“Oh, if you’re going to start out treatin’ people decent—”

“Well, why shouldn’t we? We can do it—you and I together.”

He drew a deep sigh.

“I must say, Slim, yer do beat everythink for puttin’ things on me.”

But in the end we were both admitted at one of the Saturday-evening meetings with, as usual, a large gathering of friends, and some bracing words from Straight. Pyn stood up with me as next friend, and little Spender did the same by Lovey. I have not said that during the ten days before I went to work Pyn blew in at the club during some minutes of every lunch hour to watch my progress. It was he, too, who found Lovey the job of washing windows, by which that worthy also had a chance of returning to honest ways. Indeed, though I cannot repeat it frequently enough, of the many hands stretched out to help me upward none was stronger in its grasp than that of the kindly keeper of the soda-water fountain to whom the club had given a veritable new birth.

Our admission as members had taken place while I was still doing the measurements at the memorial. By the time they were finished Coningsby had a new proposal. As it was the middle of July, he was anxious to take his wife and two little children to the country for a month. Carpenters, plasterers, painters, and plumbers were still at work on the building, and they couldn’t be left without oversight. Would I undertake to give that—at a reasonable salary?

I had grown familiar with the work by this time, and had been able to throw into the furtherance of Coningsby’s plans an enthusiasm largely sprung of gratitude. In addition I was getting back my self-confidence in proportion as I got back my self-respect. The fact, too, that in the new summer suit and straw hat to which the colonel’s advice had helped me I could go about the streets without being ashamed of myself did something to restore my natural poise.

I could see that by taking this work I should really be helping Coningsby. He needed the rest; his wife and babies undoubtedly needed the change. It was not easy for a man with so important a piece of work as this on hand to get any one satisfactorily to take his place. I could accept the offer, then, without the suspicion—which any man would hate—that it was being made to me from motives of philanthropy. I was really being useful—more useful than in taking the measurements for Mrs. Grace, which any novice could have done—and making a creditable living for the first time in years.

Then, too, I had a great deal of Cantyre’s company. He spent most of the summer in town; chiefly because of his patients, but partly from a lack of incentive in going away. He explained that lack of incentive to me during one of the spins in his runabout to which he treated me on three or four evenings a week. Now and then I worked Lovey off on him for an outing, but he, Cantyre, was generally a little peevish after such occasions. It was not that he objected to giving Lovey or any one else the air; it was that he suspected me of not really caring to go out with him. There are always men—very good fellows, too—in whom there is this strain of the jealousy of school-girls.

On this particular evening I had been kidding him about his depression, doing my best to rouse him out of it.

“Oh, I’ll pull round in time,” he said, in his resigned, lifeless tone. “If you knew the reason—”

I did know the reason, of course. My conscience never ceased to plague me with the fact that, though I could return Regina Barry’s trinkets, Cantyre’s secret was a theft I couldn’t get rid of. It was, indeed, partly to lead him on to confiding it to me of his own accord, so that I might know it legitimately, so to speak, that I brought the subject up.

“I suppose it’s about a girl.”

So long a time passed that I thought he was not going to respond to this challenge, when he said, “Yes.”

“Wouldn’t she have you?” I asked, bluntly.

“She said she would—and changed her mind.”

“So that you were actually engaged?”

“For about a month.”

“Did she— You don’t mind my asking questions, do you?”

“Not if you won’t mind if I don’t answer.”

“Then with that proviso I’ll go on. Did she tell why she—why she broke it off?”

“Not—not exactly.”

“And haven’t you found out?”

“Elsie Coningsby, she’s her great friend, told me something of it. She said there were two kinds of women. Some liked to be wooed, and others weren’t satisfied unless they were conquered.”

“And you took the wrong method?”

“So it seems.”

“Well, why don’t you turn round now and take the right one?”

His dreamy, melancholy eyes slid toward me.

“Do you see me doing that? I’m the kind of bloke that would like a woman to conquer him. If it comes to that, there are two kinds of men.”

He had told me so much that I felt it right to give him a warning.

“Since you say she’s a friend of Elsie Coningsby’s, I mayn’t be able to help finding out who she is.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t mind that—not with you. As a matter of fact, I should like to introduce you to her one of these days.”

I broke in more hastily than I intended, “No, no; don’t do that—for God’s sake!”

He swung round in amazement. “Why—why, what’s the matter?”

I tried to recover myself. “Oh, nothing! Only, you must see for yourself that—that after what I’ve been through I’m not—not a lady’s man.”

“Oh, get out!” was his only observation.

We lapsed into one of our long silences, which was broken when we turned back toward town.

“Look here, Frank,” he said, suddenly, “you can’t go on living down there in Vandiver Street. Besides, the club will be needing your bed for some one else.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it. I simply don’t want to move.”

“You’ll have to, though.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

He went on to suggest a small apartment in the bachelor house he was living in himself. Now was the time to rent, before men began coming back to town. He knew of a little suite of three rooms and a bath which ought to be within my means. As we passed the house we stopped and looked at it. I liked it and promised to turn the matter over in my mind.

Next day I broached it to Lovey. The effect was what I expected. He grasped me by the arm, looking up at me with eyes the more eloquent from the fact that they were dead.

“Y’ain’t goin’ to leave me, Slim?”

“It wouldn’t be leaving you, Lovey.”

“Y’ain’t goin’ to live in another ’ouse, where I sha’n’t be seein’ ye every day?”

“You could get a room near.”

“’Twouldn’t be the same thing—not noway, it wouldn’t be. Oh, Slim!”

With a gesture really dramatic he smote his chest with his two clenched fists, and drew a long, grating sigh.

We were sitting on our beds, which were side by side in one of the dormitories. It was the nearest thing to privacy the club-house ever allowed us.

“This’ll be the hend of me; and it’ll be the hend of you, Slim, if I ain’t there to watch over you. You’ll never keep straight without me, sonny.” He was struck with a new idea, and, indeed, I had thought of it myself. “Didn’t ye say,” he went on, as he leaned forward and tapped my knee, “that in them rooms there was one little dark room?”

“Very little and very dark.”

“But it wouldn’t be too little or too dark for me, Slim, not if I could be your valet, like. I could do everythink for you, just like a gentleman. My father was a valet, and he larned me before he couldn’t larn me nothink else. I could keep your clothes so as you’d never need new ones, and I could mend and darn and cook your breakfasts—I’m a swell cook—I can bile tea and coffee and heggs—many’s the time I’ve done it—”

“All right, Lovey,” I interrupted. “It’s a bargain. We’re buddies.”

“No, Slim; we won’t be buddies no more. We’ll call that off. We’ll just be master and man. I’ll know my place and I’ll keep it. I sha’n’t call you Slim, nor sonny—”

“Oh yes, you must.”

He shook his head.

“No; not after we’ve moved from the club. I’ll call you Mr. Melbury and say sir to you; and you must call me Lovey, just as if it was my real name.” He added, unexpectedly to me: “I suppose ye know it ain’t my real name?”

“Oh, what does it matter?”

“It only matters like this: I ain’t—I ain’t—” He got up in some agitation and went to one of the windows. After looking out for a second or two he turned half round toward me. “Ye ain’t thinking me any better than I am, Slim, are you?”

“I’m not thinking whether you’re better or worse, Lovey. I just like you.”

“And I’ve took an awful fancy to you, Slim. Seems as if you was my whole family. But—but you’re not, sonny. I’ve—I’ve got a family. They’re dead to me and I’m dead to them; but they’re my family. Did ye know that, Slim?”

“I didn’t know it, and you needn’t tell me.”

“But if I was awful bad, sonny? If I was wuss than anythink that’d ever come into your ’ead?”

“We won’t talk about that. Perhaps there are things that I could tell you which would show that there’s not much difference between us.”

“I ’ope there is, Slim. And she was terr’ble aggravatin’; a drinkin’ woman, besides. I didn’t drink then—’ardly not at all. It was after I was acquitted I begun that. And my two gells—well, bein’ acquitted didn’t make no difference to them; they’d seen. Only, they didn’t swear that way in their hevidence. They swore she fell down the stairs she was found at the bottom of, her neck broken; and, bein’ a drinkin’ woman, the jury thought—But the two gells knew. And when I was let off they didn’t ’ave no more to do with me—so I come over ’ere—”

I rose and went to him, laying my hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t, Lovey. That’s enough. I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done, we’ll stick it out together. The only thing is that we’ll have to give up the booze.”

“For good and all, Slim?”

“Yes; for good and all.”

“It’ll be awful ’ard.”

“Yes, it will be; but the worst of that is over.”

He seized one of my hands in both of his.

“Slim, if it’s got to be a ch’ice between you and liquor—well, I’m danged if—if I won’t”—he made a great resolution—“give up the liquor—and so ’elp me!”

So when I moved Lovey moved with me. Washing windows having become a lucrative profession, he insisted on taking no wages from me and on paying for his own food. In the matter of names we agreed on a compromise. “Before company,” as he expressed it, I was Mr. Melbury and sir; when we were alone together we reverted to the habits of Greeley’s Slip and the Down and Out, and I became Slim and sonny.

I was truly sorry to leave the club, for its simple, brotherly ways, wholesome and masculine, if never the most refined, had become curiously a part of me. I had liked the fellowship with rough men who were perhaps all the more human for being rough. For the first time in my life I had known something of genuine fraternity. I do not affirm that we lived together without disagreements or misunderstandings or that there were no minutes electric with the tension that makes for an all-round fight. But there was always some “wise guy,” as we called him, to make peace among us; and on the whole we lived together with a mutual courtesy that proved to me once for all that it is nothing external which makes a gentleman. Finer gentlemen in the essentials of the word I never met than some of those who were just struggling up from the seemingly bottomless pit.

Thus the summer of 1913 became for me a very happy one. There were reserves to that happiness, and there were fears; but the optimism most of us bring to the day’s work enabled me to face them. Of Regina Barry I heard much from my friend Cantyre, and I made what I heard suffice me. He was always willing to talk of this girl, whom he never named; and little by little I formed an image in my heart, which would never be anywhere but in my heart as long as I could help it. As long as I could help it I should not see her, nor should she see me. As to that I was now quite positive. Nothing could be gained by my seeing her, while by her seeing me everything might be lost.

If everything was lost in one way I was sure it would be lost in another. Because I have said little or nothing of the fight I was making you must not suppose that I was free from the necessity of making it. I was making it every day and hour. There were times when, if I hadn’t had Lovey to think of, I should have yielded to that suggestion which had come to me as neatly as it had come to him of having a little fall. Falls were far from unknown among us. They were accepted as an unhappy matter of course. Some of our steadiest members had made full use of the three times the law of the club allowed them before finally settling down. I believed that I could exercise this privilege—and come back. But not so with Lovey! Once he failed in this attempt, I knew he would be gone. As a matter of fact, he would have failed at any time after the first week if it hadn’t been on my account; so I couldn’t fail on his. When I would have done it eagerly, wildly, I was withheld by the old-fashioned motto of _noblesse oblige_.

And yet in proportion as I grew stronger I realized more clearly that my future was, as it were, balanced on the point of a pin. Once I had met Regina Barry, and her eyes had said, “You are the man who stole my gold-mesh purse,” I knew it would be all up with me. She wouldn’t have to say a word. Her look would bring the accusation. Then, if I was weak I should go off and get drunk; I should drink till I drank myself to death. If I was strong I should shoot myself. There was just one thing of which I was sure—I should never face that silent charge a second time.

But as the weeks went by and nothing happened I began to be confident that nothing would. We reached the end of September and I never heard Regina Barry’s name. Even Cantyre hadn’t told me that, and didn’t suppose that I knew it. I calculated the chances against our ever meeting. I built something, too, on the possibility that were we to meet she wouldn’t know me again.

In this I got encouragement from the fact that one day in Fifth Avenue I met my uncle Van Elstine. He didn’t know me. He wouldn’t have cut me for anything in the world; he was too good-natured and kind; but he let his wandering gaze rest on me as on any passing stranger, and went on his way. I argued then that time, vicissitude, a hard life, and a mustache had worked an effective disguise. If my own uncle, who had known me all my life, could go by like that, how much more one to whom I could be nothing but a sinister shadow seen for three or four minutes in a rose-colored gloom.

So I reasoned and became a little comforted. And then one day my arguments were put to the test.

It was quite at the end of September. The memorial was now so nearly completed that Coningsby, who had returned to town, left it almost entirely to my charge. A new bit of work at Atlantic City having come his way, he was closely absorbed in it. Mrs. Grace had motored up once or twice to consult me as to papers, rugs, and other details of interior decoration. I found her a grave, beautiful woman who gave the impression of nourishing something that lasts longer than grief—a deep regret. Our intercourse was friendly but impersonal.

Once she was accompanied by a young lady whose voice I recognized as they approached the room in which I was at work. It was a clear, bell-like, staccato voice, whose tones would have made my heart stop still had I heard it in heaven. Mrs. Grace entered the room, followed by a girl as Anglo-Saxon in type as her brother, only with a decision and precision in the manner which he had not.

In my confusion I was uncertain as to whether or not there was an introduction, but I remember her saying: “Oh, Mr. Melbury, Ralph is so indebted to you for all the help you’ve given him. He says if it hadn’t been for you he wouldn’t have been able to get away from New York this summer.”

She, too, regarded me impersonally, as her brother’s assistant, and no more. I mean by that that she showed none of the interest good people generally display in a brand that has been plucked from the burning.

“Is it possible she doesn’t know it?” I asked Cantyre the next time I saw him.

“Of course she doesn’t. That would be the last thing Coningsby would tell her. We never speak of these things outside the club. If a fellow likes to do it himself—well, that’s his own affair.”

But early in October I came face to face with it all.

I was standing at one of the upper windows, looking down into Blankney Place, when I saw a motor drive up to the door. I knew it was Mrs. Grace’s motor, having seen it a number of times already. When the footman held open the door Mrs. Grace herself stepped out, to be followed by Miss Coningsby, who in turn was followed by....

I strolled away from the window into the interior of the house. I was not so much calm as numb. There were details about which I had to speak to Mrs. Grace, but they all went out of my mind. They went out of my mind as matters with which I had no more concern. A dying man might feel that way about the earthly things he is leaving behind. I was, in fact, not so much like a dying man as like a man who in the full flush of vigor is told that he must in a few minutes face the firing-squad.

So I stood doing nothing, thinking nothing, while I listened to the three voices as they floated up, first from the lower floor, then from the stairway, then from the floor on which I was waiting in this seeming nervelessness.

They drifted nearer—Mrs. Grace’s gentle tones, Elsie Coningsby’s silvery tinkle, and then the rich mezzo, which by association of ideas seemed to shed round me a rose-colored light.

Mrs. Grace and Miss Coningsby came in together, the one in black, the other in white. Both bade me a friendly, impersonal good morning, while Mrs. Grace proceeded at once to the question of rugs. Didn’t I think that good serviceable American rugs, with some of those nice Oriental druggets people used in summer cottages, would be better than anything more fragile and expensive?

I made such answers as I could, keeping my eyes on the door. Presently she appeared on the threshold, looking about with interest and curiosity in her great, dark eyes. Of the minute I retain no more than a vision in rough green English tweed, with a goldish-greenish motoring-veil round the head like a nimbus. She impressed me as at once more delicate and more strong than I remembered her—eager, alert, independent.

“This is to be the men’s smoking-room,” Miss Coningsby explained.

“Wouldn’t you know it?” Miss Barry said, lightly. “One of the nicest rooms in the house—I think the very nicest. It’s wonderful how well men do themselves, isn’t it?”

“Oh, but in this case it’s Hilda.”

“It’s your brother first of all. You’ll see. It will be the snuggest corner of the whole place, and they won’t let a woman look into it.”

She glanced at me—but casually. She glanced again—but casually again. As no one introduced me, a greeting between us was not called for. But when Mrs. Grace finished her questions about the rugs and they were passing into the next room, Regina Barry turned and looked at me a third time. It was now an inquiring look, and significant.

“Elsie, who’s that man?” I heard her say, after she had joined her companions.

The reply gave my name.

“Oh!”

“He’s been helping Ralph all summer. That’s how he and Esther were able to get away.”

“Oh!”

“Now we’re going on to the day nursery—”

But Regina Barry said: “Wait a minute! No; go on. I’ll overtake you. I’m—I’m perfectly sure that that’s the very man who—” She added, as if forcing herself to a determination: “I’m going back to speak to him. Tell Hilda I’ll be with her in an instant.”

So I waited, repeating to myself the formula agreed on two or three months before, that I would see her first—and shoot myself afterward.

_CHAPTER IX_

“Haven’t we met before?”

Regina Barry said this as she came into the room with her rapid, easy movement and took two or three paces toward me, stopping as abruptly as she entered.

I hung my head, crimsoning slowly.

“Yes.”

“I thought so, though I didn’t recognize you at first. I knew I had some association with you, but it was so vague—”

“Of course.”

“Then I had no idea you were an architect.”

“How could you?”

“You see, meeting you for so short a time—”

“And practically in the dark—”

“I don’t remember that. But I had no chance to ask anything about you. I only hoped you’d come back.”

“Oh, I couldn’t have done that.”

“Why not?”

“I should think you’d understand.”

“I don’t—considering that I asked you particularly.”

“I know you asked me particularly, but anything in life—or death—would have been easier than to obey you.”

“What did I do to frighten you so?”

“Nothing but show me too much mercy.”

“Oh, I didn’t think anything of that.”

“Of what? Of the crime—or of the forgiveness?”

“Of the crime, of course.”

I stepped back from her in amazement.

“You didn’t think anything of—”

“Why, no! I’ve often done the same myself.”

“You? You’ve often done—”

“Of course! Everybody has—at one time or another in their lives. Naturally it doesn’t happen every day—and one wouldn’t want it to. One wouldn’t have anything left in the house if it did; but once in a way—it’s nothing. What astonishes me is that you should have thought of it.”

“But—but you’ve thought of it.”

“Oh, well—that’s different. But please don’t suppose that I’ve thought of it seriously. It simply happened that that evening—” The only sign of embarrassment she gave was in grasping the greenish-goldish veil with her left hand and pulling it round over her bosom. The great eyes, of which the light made one doubtful as to the color, glowed feverishly, and the long scarlet lips threw at me one of their daring, challenging smiles. “Do you want me to be absolutely frank?”

“We began with frankness, didn’t we? Why shouldn’t we keep it up?”

“Well, it happened that that evening I’d broken off my engagement.”

Not to betray all I had learned by my eavesdropping behind the rose-colored hangings, I merely said, “Indeed?”

“Yes; and so I was a little—well, perhaps a little excited. And anything that happened impressed me more than it would have done ordinarily. If I’ve thought of the way you appeared—and what happened when you did—it’s only been because it was part of the hours right after—” There was another of those smiles that were amusingly apologetic as well as amusingly provocative. “You’re—you’re not married, are you?”

“No.”

“Nor engaged?”

“No.”

“Ever been?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t imagine what it is to have been engaged and nearly married—and then to find yourself free again. Everything associated with the minute comes to be imprinted on your memory. That’s why I’ve thought of it, though I didn’t for the minute recognize you as the man.”

“And now that you have recognized me—”

“I hope you’ll do as I asked you before, and come and see us again.” She added, as she was about to turn away, “How’s Annette?”

I had been puzzled hitherto; I was now bewildered.

“You mean Annette Van Elstine? Did you know she was my cousin?”

“Of course! Didn’t she bring you?”

“Bring me?” I stammered. “Bring me—where?”

“Why, to our house!”

“When?”

“The time we’re talking about—when you upset Mrs. Sillinger’s coffee and broke the cup.”

It is difficult to say whether I was relieved or not. I could only falter, “I—I don’t believe I’m the man.”

She came back two or three steps toward me.

“Why, of course you’re the man! Isn’t your name Melbury?”

“Yes—but—but I’m not the only Melbury. Could it have been my—my brother, Jack?”

“What’s your name?”

“Frank.”

She gazed at me a minute before saying: “Then—then I think it must have been—your brother. I remember now that Annette did call him Jack.” She continued, “But what did you mean when—when you said it was you?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I haven’t the remotest idea.”

“Look at me again.”

“I can’t look at you again, because I’m looking at you all the time. You’re most wonderfully like your brother.”

“I don’t think I am. I met my uncle Van Elstine in the street the other day and he didn’t know me.”

“Oh, well, strangers often see resemblances that escape members of a family. All I get by looking at you is that I see your brother. He was awfully nice. We so—we so wished he’d come back. He—he wasn’t like everybody else.”

“He’s married now.”

I wonder if I am right in thinking that a slight shadow crossed her face. There may have been, too, a forced jauntiness in her tone as she said, “Oh, is he?”

I nodded.

She turned away again, but again wheeled half round to face me.

“Well, now we know what I meant; but what on earth did you mean?”

I drew myself up for real inspection.

“Can’t you think?”

She shook her head.

“I must say you seemed inordinately penitent over a broken cup, even if Mrs. Sillinger was so cross. She said you spilled the coffee all over her dress; but you didn’t.”

“You mean Jack.”

“Oh yes! What a bother! I shall always get you mixed up in the future.”

“I hope not—for his sake.”

“Now don’t tease me. Tell me where we met.”

“If I do—”

She brightened, the smile of the scarlet lips growing vividly brilliant.

“I know. It was at the Millings’, at Tarrytown.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then it was at the Wynfords’, at Old Westbury? They always have so many people there—”

“Think again.”

“What’s the good of thinking when, if I could remember you, I should do it right away?”

“It seems extraordinary to me that you can have forgotten.”

“You seem very sure of the impression you made on me.”

“I am.”

“And I’ve forgotten all about it!”

“You haven’t forgotten the impression; you’ve only forgotten me.”

“Oh, Mr. Melbury, tell me! Please! I’ve got to run off and overtake Mrs. Grace; and I can’t do it unless I know.”