Chapter XI

McDowell's second check to Vibert proved good on the opening of business next morning. It was paid in the usual mechanical and impersonal fashion that gives no possible clue to the amount of the balance remaining after; but paid it was, all the same, and Vibert's anticipated opportunity for further invective--an opportunity which he considered quite possible, and would have been by no means sorry to embrace--came to naught.

McDowell's friendly intimation that St. Asaph's might presently dispense with Vibert's services was soon found to have as solid a backing as his signature. Within less than a fortnight Vibert was dismissed, though on grounds not altogether the same as those that McDowell had figured upon.

If Vibert, after descending to the ground floor, had immediately crossed the great court of the Clifton instead of lingering there for a moment, the outcome might have been quite different. But he paused in the midst of its mosaicked expanse to pull out the check from his pocket and to take another look at it. He projected his vision so far into the future as the next forenoon, and saw the check again rejected--this time by the teller of the Highflyers'--by reason of "no account," or perhaps by reason of "no funds." He dramatized a precipitous visit to McDowell's office, and improvised the scene of denunciation and vigorous action that was to accompany it.

"It had better be good this time," he muttered, with his eyes on the pavement. "I'll strangle him if it ain't."

He tossed up his head and sent a fierce and frowning glance through one of the great plates of French glass that shut in the court. His eye darted forward on its own level, but it saw nothing save McDowell in his office, ten or twelve floors above.

Most of the panes that enclosed this central space were of great height and breadth, and were lettered with the silvered styles and titles of various railroad and mining companies; others, smaller, gave light and some ventilation to a few booth-like shops; a few others, immovable half-lights, admitted a little daylight and no air at all to certain closet-like crannies that had a squeezed and crowded rôle in the Clifton's general economy. One of these last looked out from under a kind of secondary stairway; it lighted the scullery of the Acme Lunch Room, and it commanded a view of that side of the court on which Vibert was standing.

Vibert's heel gave a vicious dig into the mosaic pavement and made a quick and rasping turn towards the exit; he crossed the court with a heavy yet rapid stride, and passed out into the street. He was quite unconscious of observation, but he had been seen.

Through the half-pane under the stairway a young woman had noted his presence and witnessed his departure. She was a thin, faded creature, in the forlorn garments of an undisguisable poverty. All but the faintest traces of good looks seemed to have been taken from her by a long experience with illness and suffering. She stood close against the pane. Her thin fingers, red and chapped, showed, as they pressed against the glass, the crinkled puffiness that comes from long immersion in hot water, and she stared through with a look of mingled fear, entreaty, and agony. At the glance which Vibert's indignation over McDowell's trickery sent in her direction, she started and cowered like one who had encountered that glance before; and when he turned to go she recovered herself, and flung her bosom and her hands against the pane as if bent upon breaking through and following him.

A moment later she appeared in the court; she had put on a shabby hat and a flimsy, faded shawl. She crossed over hastily, and approached the head of the elevator squad.

"The tall, dark man who just went out--you saw him?" she inquired hurriedly. She spoke in two quick-expulsions of the breath, and seemed left without a third.

"Um?" The man opposed his gold band and gilt buttons to her forlorn and bedraggled shabbiness. His brief inquiry, made without opening his lips, had the true official indifference; but it caused his questioner to feel some of the disadvantage that comes to a young woman from a public and impulsive inquiry after a young man.

"You saw him standing over there; he had a paper in his hand. Tell me, does he work in this building?" She was panting and all a-tremble, but she found breath for these words and will to use it.

"Yes, I saw him," the man answered, with the slow reluctance of his kind to be interested in individuals as individuals. "Used to work here, I believe. Haven't seen much of him lately."

"Where can I find him?"

The man turned towards the elevators; one had just that minute come down. "Chicago!" its youthful conductor had called with an airy drawl.

"Pete," said his superior; "a tall, dark man who's been standing around here." He threw his thumb over towards the girl, to indicate that the inquiry was hers. "Had on a soft brown hat."

"Yes, I seen him," said the boy. "Used to be in one of them insurance offices, didn't he? Vibert--was that his name?"

"Vi--?"

"Vibert," said the man, impatiently. "Come, come, don't block the way--sev-en!" he cried, in his professional tone, and the boy at once slammed his door to and started roofwards.

The man retired into himself with a resumption of his air of idle dignity. The girl, at a short remove, stood looking at him with an anxious face. She made a timid attempt to approach him again and presently stole away.

Vibert was followed down from McDowell's office, in the course of half an hour, by Ogden. McDowell's dissertation on tax matters, with its pointed presentation of extreme cases, had left him, as we have seen, in a state more or less stirred up; and it had occurred to him that if he were to stop on the way down he might find some legal sedative in the office of Freeze & Freeze. But the hour was now rather late; Freeze & Freeze were being locked up by the last of their junior clerks; and Ogden was left to ramble through the corridors in a confused and disconsolate state.

He was presently accosted by a young woman, who appeared to be roaming through the building in a state even more dazed and forlorn than his own. She approached him with appeal so plainly written on her features that his hand went instinctively to his pocket for the ready dime. He was used to addresses of this sort; Brower had told him many times that he was a "soft mark." He soon ascertained, however, that what she wanted was not alms, but information--an appeal which is more familiar still in the great down-town buildings; it comes frequently enough from simple, inexperienced creatures who know what they want, but not at all how to get it.

The girl thrust back a straggling lock and gave him a glance both wild and timid.

"Please, sir," she said, "do you know any one in this building named Vibert--in an insurance office?" She pronounced the name with an effort of overcoming its strangeness.

There was a certain primitiveness in her speech; it was provincial, rustic--a fine ear might have called it uncouth.

Ogden was struck with her plaintive "please, sir." He had never before heard that literary form of speech in actual use.

"Well," he said, with the unceremonious kindness proper to the occasion and person, "I think you can learn something about him in the office of the Vesuvian--next floor below."

"Oh, thank you, sir!" She made a movement suggestive of an abbreviated courtesy; it was as much in the way of acknowledgment as her sense of strangeness and confusion of mind appeared to permit.

"Not that way," called Ogden after her, adding a benevolent postscript. "Here; come along down these stairs with me; I'll show you where it is."

She stumbled after him down the marble steps with a heavy-footed clatter that could hardly have been expected from her slightness, and with a timorous hold on the bronze of the hand-rail.

"There," indicated Ogden; "the sixth door along, on the right. 'Vesuvian Fire Insurance Co.' it says." And he himself continued an abstracted descent by the stairway.

His nearest way home lay through the court and out of the door that led into the asphalted alley. Just within the archway of this door two men stood. The one was Vibert and the other was a dark young fellow of twenty or more whom Ogden, by a brief glimmer of fancy, made to be Brainard's younger son. Vibert was in the act of receiving a roll of bills from him.

The youth had a pinched and slender aspect; there was a furtive tremulousness in his hands; his eyes were reddish and the pupils swam half hazily in a lucent humor.

"I didn't know, Mark, but what you'd gone back on me, too," Vibert was saying to him. "If you'd managed to get around a little sooner you'd have saved a certain party from the grand razoo." He smiled grimly. "It's pretty close sailing--thirty, forty, forty-five"--he ran over the bills, rolled them up, and thrust them into his pocket.

The boy looked at him with some doubt and with a shade of fear. He seemed to have been fascinated and then dominated by the bigness and the hardihood of the other.

"It's all right, Mark," Vibert presently went on with a dogged vagueness; "I'm his son, too. Why wouldn't he give me any show? Why wouldn't he let me have a chance to show him what I am? Why did he go and shut down on me at the very start?"

"You!" cried the boy. "What can you expect, after the way he's treated me--his own son? They're up there now, I dare say"--with a bitter glance towards the corner of the Underground--"but they can never make things right with me. If it hadn't been for Abbie--she's about the only one that's turned a hand for me."

"Haven't I done well by you, too?--don't forget that. Well, you don't--'sh! I say you don't. Let the executors settle, and give 'em plenty to settle, too; they'll get enough for doing it." Vibert glanced up at the Underground windows. "He can't live forever." He brought his eyes back to the boy. "You've got to live yourself, though, and so have I. You've got some rights, haven't you?"

The boy did not accept this cue; perhaps he had already followed it more than once. He studied Vibert with eyes that seemed to indicate a change of thought.

"Say, Russ," he hinted, deprecatingly, "you're going to be a little more patient with Mayme?"

Vibert scowled. "Come, now, Marcus, that's all right; only don't let's have any preaching. What I like is a cheerful house--and an orderly one. Less sniffling and better meals. I guess you won't deny that, for a housekeeper, your sister is a good deal of a fizzle. She doesn't have to wash her own dishes, does she? And that girl I got her does the scrubbing and takes up the ashes, doesn't she? And we always take our dinners out, don't we? Well, then! I don't see what else we can do but go out altogether."

He drubbed his foot impatiently on the pavement.

"Well, so long!" he said carelessly to his companion. "Better not take anything more this afternoon. Do I see you on the track to-morrow?"

Ogden, of course, heard next to nothing of this talk, and his own preoccupations left him no opportunity to scandalize over the relations between Vibert and the young woman of the corridors, even if his inclinations had run that way. But it need not be denied that so close a grouping of these various persons turned his thoughts in the direction of the Brainard household, and his feet later in the direction of the Brainard house. He had lately been cultivating a more sympathetic apprehension of Abbie Brainard's position; it seemed possible that an hour's talk would offer opportunity for the delicate insinuation of his friendly interest. He rehearsed a number of suitable phrases; they took felicitous advantage of remarks on her side--remarks which he himself constructed--and left her, as she thought them over, in no doubt of his feeling sense of her position and of his desire to make his sympathies known and operative. That all these pretty paces would have been gone through in the absence of the Valentines is by no means certain; but their presence excluded the least attempt to try them, and it was with lagging feet indeed that he made his late return home to Brower and "Monte Cristo."