Chapter XIII

The appearance and deportment of young Frederick Pratt as a witness in the Vibert case offered several delicate shades whose noting and whose accounting for may justify a paragraph or two. His general effect, then, was in the highest degree sobered, chastened, depressed. To what was this to be attributed?

To his consciousness of the overshadowing majesty of the law? No; for the law had turned its softest and most silken side outward; the little party had taken up its informal grouping at the judge's elbow and had replied conversationally to the interrogations of the judge himself or to the prompting inquiries of Brainard's attorney. Justicia had appeared in her most sympathetic and domestic aspect.

Was the youth disappointed as to his performance of a _beau rôle_? There is no doubt that he had anticipated with some relish his first appearance in the witness-box. He would have been obliged, it is true, to confess himself a minor, and he might have been exposed to the humiliating necessity of declaring that he understood the nature of an oath; but after that all would have been smooth sailing. Only to be for full fifteen minutes the observed of all observers, to be able to lift up his voice and tell--all--he--knew! Yet to be balked in this called for exasperation rather than deep dejection, and deep dejection, after all, was what he chiefly showed.

Was this dejection the sign of sympathetic sorrow for the woes of his former friend and playmate? Not quite. His sympathy, while real enough, was largely the sprightly product of novelty, curiosity, and conscious self-importance; unentangled with other considerations, it would have shown itself in a nervous and volatile loquacity.

But Freddy in court was not loquacious; he gave his testimony after a benumbed and backward fashion that indicated other and deeper troubles. The boy, in fact, was under a cloud. An issue of some importance had arisen between the Underground National Bank and its youngest messenger; it involved no less a question than that of _meum_ and _tuum_. Freddy Pratt, as messenger, had been in the habit of making two or three daily trips through the business district, during which the notes and acceptances that filled his big official wallet came to be exchanged for checks and greenbacks that represented corresponding values. One or two discrepancies had developed that called for attention.

The boy's father came down to the Underground to contribute his share of this attention. He was a grave, repressive, saturnine person, who might have been set down as possessed of far greater means to meet the requirements of a growing boy in the midst of a circle of well-to-do urban acquaintances than of inclination to study those requirements. He was received in Brainard's own private room, and the affairs of the penitent and sobbing boy were discussed over his head by his parent and his employer.

"You foolish child," said the elder Pratt to his son, in the self-conscious tone by which we address age through youth; "if you wanted anything, why didn't you ask me for it?"

This father, seriously handicapped as he was by his own temperament, was attempting to treat the matter as something rather slight and trivial. The pettiness of the amount involved, the perfect ease of restitution, the youth of the offender, the utter simplicity and primitiveness of his method--all these he touched upon with a feint of light-handed ease. Another might have blown an airy bubble like this, even in the face of Brainard's ominous and taciturn frown; but Pratt was not the man to do it. He soon left the upper air of informal jocularity for the firmer ground of argument and expostulation, and this ground, before he ended, was almost pressed by the knees of entreaty.

"It's plain enough," said Brainard, at length; "he took it, and he kept it."

Each one, from his own point of view, cast his eye on the culprit.

"But it can't be that you mean to ruin a boy's future in any such way as this?" snarled the boy's father with a rasping expostulation.

Brainard turned a look on him from under his overhanging brows.

"Um," he merely said, in a voice which might have meant anything.

But the affair presently came to adjustment--a treaty with several clauses. Brainard wished to use the boy in court; to dispose of the Vibert matter in the cursory fashion that he hoped to follow permitted scant margin for the plea of desertion, and he was depending on young Pratt for the recital of certain occurrences which, in a cumulative way, might have their bearings on the plea of cruelty. Pratt, Jr., was to testify in court, Pratt, Sr., was to reimburse the bank, and the boy's final dismissal from the Underground would then be timed in a way so disassociated from any particular cause as to excite no comment and to occasion no injury. But all this was scant and nominal payment for Brainard's clemency; a larger one followed.

Brainard owned a number of woe-begone tenements scattered here and there over that unattractive part of the West Side which is most affected by manufacturers of furniture. One of these tumble-down dwellings adjoined a large lot owned by Ingles--took out one corner, in fact, in such a way as to interfere seriously with its value for building purposes. Ingles, in treaty with a furniture firm for the putting up of a building, had made an offer for this corner. Brainard, informed as to the circumstances, had put a price on it that was excessive--exorbitant. Ingles had taken time for consideration; and at the very moment of Pratt's call a letter from him lay on Brainard's desk, to the effect that he was looking elsewhere; evidently, on principle, he was drawing off. Brainard had no use for the property, and it was hardly paying taxes. He wanted to sell it at his own figure, and he had expected to. Ingles's tactics nettled him; he solaced himself by a step that reached Ingles and Pratt at the same time. He sardonically raised his price a peg higher, and offered the property to Pratt with an intimation that refusal would not be entertained. He put his lot still further beyond the reach of Ingles's possible necessities, and he made it realize even more than Ingles had declined to pay. Pratt swallowed this mouthful with such grace as he could command; and with the celerity possible to a perfected system of land transfer when supplemented by the guarantee of a title company, Norval H. Pratt, in a day or two, became the owner, at an excessive price, of a piece of property for which he had no use, and for which, so far as he knew, no one else had any use either.

This transaction was at once noted by McDowell, whose study of the daily transfers as reported in the real-estate publications was minute, and whose attention had been fixed for some time on this particular piece of ground. He knew something of Ingles's intentions, through the people whom Ingles was endeavoring to accommodate, and he saw here the entering wedge that he had waited for so long. He had approached Brainard unsuccessfully; he now tried Pratt. Pratt, who figured himself justly enough as a lamb led to the shearing, made no effort to evade the rôle; he promptly made an agreement for the transfer of the Brainard lot to McDowell. He let it go at a decided sacrifice--he sold it at a possible shade under its actual value.

McDowell, whose eagerness had committed him to an out-and-out purchase, was now in a position to approach Ingles. He was willing to sell the ground for simply what it had cost him; his profits would come later, through that open door between 1262 and 1263. Ingles received him coldly. He had disposed, he said, of his holdings in that neighborhood, and was using the proceeds to build for his new tenants in another quarter. He bowed McDowell out with a faintly cynical contempt, and this enterprising person was left with an unpromising piece of ground on his hands to dispose of as best he might. He tried the new purchasers of Ingles's lot; his own was not necessary to their purposes.

McDowell was seriously embarrassed. This bit of ground was a trifle in itself--to Ingles or to Pratt it mattered little either way; but to McDowell, who was of a considerably smaller calibre, the thing came as a kind of last straw. In expectation of great activity in acres he had loaded himself down with outside property; everything of his own was invested in that way, everything that was his wife's, and something, to tell the truth, that was neither his nor his wife's. He was in up to his chin, and at this moment came Ogden, asking him in set terms for an accounting and a settlement.

McDowell met this demand with a promise of figures, and he renewed this promise several times. The intervals between gave opportunity for a slow insinuation of the truth--for a graduated confession that a considerable part of old Mr. Ogden's estate was tied up in the operations of his son-in-law. This confession was followed by his statement; but it was some time before the account opened at the Underground by George received any great enlargement through the agent of the administratrix.

"It's all right, though," McDowell said; "you don't need to worry, and there's no use in stirring things up. There's big money ahead, and you'll stand in."

But the statement was the ground, and a sufficient one, for a rupture. McDowell, in order to diminish his indebtedness to the estate, had charged it with various fees and percentages of his own, and with numerous items that properly concerned his individual and household expenses. He charged the estate with a new porch on the front of his own house, and with the full expense of railway travel which had been undertaken in great part for his own interests. He even made a hardy attempt to force the Brainard lot upon the indignant widow.

Mrs. Ogden immediately left his house, in spite of the good offices of her bewildered daughter. George himself, forecasting the future, beheld a long succession of wrangling days in the law-courts and in the offices of attorneys--days that threatened to surpass in worry, loss, expense, and nerve-wear anything that his family had experienced yet. He felt himself on the threshold of a struggle for which he was but scantily equipped, and in which he was certain to be seriously handicapped through consideration for Kittie.

Absorbed in these moody reflections, he was crossing the court of the Clifton on a Saturday afternoon when a pencil-tap on one of the great glass panes took his attention. The tap was sounded on the court frontage of Darrell & Bradley's branch, and George started from his revery to see the face of Bradley himself looking out at him over the rulers, mucilage bottles, and memorandum-books that formed symmetrical piles within.

Bradley hastened to throw open the narrow glass door adjoining the show-window, and motioned George in with a friendly and quizzical grimace.

"Let Jones walk," he said, crinkling up his eyes and laying his fat hand on Ogden’s shoulder.

"He is walking," responded George, with a wan smile.

Bradley drew him in and closed the door.

"Well, let him walk in a different path, then. Let him come out to Hinsdale to-morrow and try the primrose path."

"Of dalliance?" asked George, with a doleful attempt to meet half-way the cheery facetiousness of the other.

Well, I don’t think a little dalliance would hurt him." Bradley made it seem quite absurd that a young fellow of twenty-five should have any real cares and annoyances. "All work and no play—you know."

"Im afraid so, admitted George, with a pathos that the elder man found amusing.

Bradley stepped back to a snug office that was stowed away behind a tall piece of shelving piled with newly bound account-books, to pick up his hat. "I'm glad to have caught sight of you," he proceeded, with the friendliness of an elder brother; "I've just taken an hour or so to overhaul things here a little. If you're going north, I'll walk a block or two with you."

They passed out into the street and picked their way along through the splashing, slumping, and dripping that marks the spring break-up. They elbowed other pedestrians over miry flaggings, and they dodged the muddy spray that bumping trucks sent up from the street-car tracks at almost every crossing.

"My wife's wondering what has become of you," Bradley puffed out among many other things, as he tried to keep up with Ogden's supple and light-footed gait. "And Jessie, too. She's home to-morrow--just back from Evanston. You come out on the eleven fifty-five, and we'll have an early dinner, and that will leave enough of the afternoon to make things worth while. And we'll show you that spring is a little nearer at hand than you'd suspect in town. Your first spring here?"

"Yes."

"Pretty bad, ain't it?"

"Worse than Boston," said George, in a tone implying that nothing further could be added.

At the next corner Bradley paused, detaining him for a moment with a friendly hand.

"Sunday noon, then. You provide the dalliance and we'll see to the primroses. Care anything for 'em?"

"Oh, yes, indeed."

"Good thing; can't have chrysanthemums all the year round. Well, good-by. Jessie will drive down for you in the buggy."

"I'll be there," called Ogden, as they drifted apart in the thickening crowd.

He had reached the point where he felt it would be a relief to cut away from town and everything in it--the bustle, the uproar, the filth, the routine of the bank, the complications of the Brainards, the entanglements of the Ogdens. It was a simple thing to do--only so many miles of flimsy and shabby shanties and back views of sheds and stables; of grimy, cindered switch-yards, with the long flanks of freight-houses and interminable strings of loaded or empty cars; of dingy viaducts and groggy lamp-posts and dilapidated fences whose scanty remains called to remembrance lotions and tonics that had long passed their vogue; of groups of Sunday loungers before saloons, and gangs of unclassifiable foreigners picking up bits of coal along the tracks; of muddy crossings over roads whose bordering ditches were filled with flocks of geese; of wide prairies cut up by endless tracks, dotted with pools of water, and rustling with the dead grasses of last summer; then suburbs new and old--some in the fresh promise of sidewalks and trees and nothing else, others unkempt, shabby, gone to seed; then a high passage over a marshy plain, a range of low wooded hills, emancipation from the dubious body known as the Cook County Commissioners--and Hinsdale.

At the station Jessie Bradley sat drawn up in a buggy: she had her place in a small convention of phætons, carryalls, and express-wagons. She tossed her head brightly and waved her whip.

"I could have walked as well as not," said Ogden, climbing in. "What's half a mile?"

"Three quarters--almost," she corrected. She gathered up the lines and secured the approved hold on the whip. "Unless _you_ care to drive?" she suggested.

"Not particular," replied Ogden, leaning back easily. "Quite willing to be a passenger."

He took a look at her sidewise from behind. She wore a pert little flat-brimmed, flat-crowned hat, set straight on the top of her head; a stray lock of hair brushed across her ear in the breeze; she had a bunch of pale purple primroses at her throat.

"You may if you want to," she said, with a sudden turn in his direction. Her eyes snapped and sparkled.

"I'd as soon see you--unless you don't care to."

"Oh, as far as that goes! Just hold on tight, though. Get up, John!"

She drew a taut rein and flicked the horse over the ear. He was a mettlesome five-year-old, and he rushed into his best gait at once. "Here we go!" she cried, "Sunday or no Sunday. I hate to poke."

She rushed him through the outskirts of the town; she bumped over the cumbrous plank crossings, she grazed one or two of the wooden posts that held up oil-lamps, she charged a flock on its homeward way from church and cut it into two frightened and indignant halves. She was on her native heath; she felt it; she showed it.

George grasped the buggy-cover with his left hand and held his right in readiness to seize the reins. The buggy, with many a bump and sudden wrench, sped on over the stones and ruts and puddles and rough crossings of an indifferent country road, and presently it turned into a yard with a rasping graze on one of the two painted white posts that made the entrance way. On the side porch of the house stood the girl's parents. They were laughing.

Jessie jumped out briskly. She struck a masculine attitude on the carriage-block, her right hand resting on the stock of her whip, her left arm a-kimbo.

"I was to get yer through on time; them was my orders, and here ye are!"

George climbed out carefully.

"Poor Horace!" chuckled Bradley, coming down; "he's here all right, but is he able to give his lecture?"

Mrs. Bradley followed, to shake hands. She wore a black silk dress, and there was a bit of lace over her thin hair--an adornment which her consciousness seemed to put forth as a modish novelty. Her wrinkles all flowed together in a companionable smile.

"He may have lost his voice on the way," she joked, "but we hope he saved his appetite."

"They're both all right," said George, laughing in turn.

Bradley was at the horse's head. "The voice is there, anyway," he said in cautious acknowledgment. "And we'll see about the appetite as soon as you've got enough spare breath to say 'Amen' to our grace." The Bradley house was a mere box of a building set in an acre lot. They had built for themselves, on finally breaking with the city, two years before; and they had accepted the gables and dormers and shingles and the brown and yellow paint that the modest suburban house of the period finds it so difficult to evade. They stood on high, rolling ground; there were half-hints of considerable vistas here and there, and they were surrounded by groves and copses through which, to-day, the first faint colors of the spring were hurtling. Bradley, after dinner, walked Ogden around the house--previous visits had been confined to the parlor. He dwelt on the swelling of the lilac buds, and he drew attention with an impartial interest to the first sproutings of his peonies and of his rhubarb. The back of the place was littered with the debris of a second green-house in an advanced stage of construction, and through this disorder he picked his way, along with his daughter and his guest, towards the door of the first.

"Hop in," said Bradley, lifting his own foot over the perpendicular threshold. The air within was but a few degrees warmer than the air without, yet closer. On either side stretched fragmental beds of young plants, with frequent breaks between. "It's late for prims, after all; and a good many of them are outside, anyway." He waved his hand over a few patches of color on the left; there were white, pink, cherry, pale purple, such as Jessie was wearing, and a few belated clumps of young and indeterminate green.

Ogden passed to and fro, with the oh's and ah's that accompany the exposition of any host's pet hobby, however partial and trifling the exhibit may be. He had done the same last autumn with the chrysanthemums.

Bradley took this tribute with the customary complacency, and presently drifted to one side for a word with his man about a small matter of glazing--he had quite an eye for broken panes. Ogden leaned against a damp ledge. Jessie had seated herself on one of the steps of a rude flower-stand; she brushed aside two or three small pots that had been left standing on it.

She showed an air of lassitude; it had been stealing over her all through dinner, and now it had completely overtaken her in the languid atmosphere of the flowers. Her slender arms hung limply, and she moved her back as if to find a comfortable rest for it. Her face, under the pallor of the painted glass, looked rather colorless and a little drawn, and a languorous apathy seemed to have taken the sparkle from her _eyes_.

She looked up at him as she dropped the petals of a primrose one by one. "You didn't care to drive, then?"

"Bid you want me to? I'm sorry not to have understood. You drove down, and so I thought--Was it too much for you, both ways?"

"Oh, no. It only struck me that you might want to. You were not--that is, you understand horses?"

"Certainly; I drive on occasion." He smiled serenely, not in the least disturbed by her perfectly obvious thought. "However, a wise man never goes out of his way to handle a strange horse--perhaps that isn't one of Solomon's proverbs, but it ought to be."

"You are awfully cautious." She rose undecidedly, and presently she sat down again with a little sigh.

"I have to be. That is my business--from half-past eight till four. Perhaps it's growing on me."

"I don't mean that. Ton were born cautions; you'd be cautions anyway."

"I'm a Down-easter, you know. Look before you leap. Perhaps I shall learn the off-hand Western ways in time. I'll try to. I'll make myself over."

"I wonder if you can," she said, half to herself. Then aloud:

"But I don't believe all Down-easters are as careful as you are. There must be lots of them who would have just laid the whip on that horse, and run over a boy or two, and knocked our gate-post to pieces, and come up to the door with a wheel just ready to break to flinders. Why couldn't you have done it? I shouldn't have minded it--I should have liked it first-rate." She spoke with a kind of lingering drawl, and there was a half-smile in her lack-lustre eye.

"Your father would have minded it, though, and so should I. Never begin to dance without arranging about the fiddler--good rule, don't you think?"

She threw a bare stem to the ground. "Oh, yes; but tiresome." She rose. "Close in here, isn't it? Let's go outside."