A Rich Man's Relatives Volume II Part 6

"But I never valse."

"It is Lancers this time. I am going to dance myself. Mrs. Martindale.

A very old friend. Knew her before either of us were married. We always have a dance when we meet. Come along!--Miss Stanley! Here is a gentleman so desirous of dancing with you, and too modest to ask. Pray take pity on him."

Miss Matilda looked up in a little surprise, but smiled on seeing Considine.

"You are a sad wag, Mr. Jordan. It seems scarcely fair that we grown-up people should crowd out the young ones. However, as Mr.

Considine is so kind----" and she rose, and taking his arm they joined the dancers.

Age is not a question to be decided by almanacs or the comparison of dates. How many generations of roses have bloomed and disappeared since the aloe was sown, a hundred years ago, which now is only opening its flower. The willow has fallen into battered decrepitude, while the oak, its slow-growing contemporary hard by, has barely reached his prime. Life should not be measured by the tale of years, but by itself--by the measure of oil unburnt, which remains within the lamp. There be some, who, making bonfire of their store--lighting the candle at both ends in the gusty weather--have consumed it mostly ere the seventh l.u.s.trum has run out, and go darkling thenceforth with nothing but a smoky wick and a guttering remnant; and there are others who have dwelt where the winds were still, and have shaded their lamps and trimmed them, like prudent virgins, whose light grows clearer as they pa.s.s along, and accompanies them with a tranquil radiance far down into the valley where the shadows are, and the inevitable end. It is the excitements and the cares which devour our strength, the unsatisfied greeds which eat inward, the ill-regulated pleasures which exhaust. Work never killed a man; or, if it did, he was a weakling, or he had mistaken his trade.

"Only look!" cried Amelia Jordan, touching her neighbour, Martha Herkimer, with her fan, "I think I may flatter myself that my juvenile party is a success, when the contagious gaiety has caught even that superannuated couple. I should feel flattered, but I confess I am not fond of frisky grey beards. There is a time for everything, even for sitting still and watching the young ones. I wonder at Considine; and really Matilda might have had more sense than yield to his absurdity."

"Do you mean the gineral and Matildy Stanley? Well now, 'pears to me, they're about the likeliest couple on the floor. If they're old it's their own business, their bones will ache the worse and the sooner; but as far as looks go, I will say there ain't man or boy of them all looks as spry as the gineral. And, as for Matildy, she looks well. I always liked Matildy, and I admire her."

"Oh, certainly, my dear, I quite agree with you. I am fond of Matilda--good simple soul--I cannot think how she missed getting married. So many worse, have established themselves well, since she was young. But really you know it is just a little ridiculous, at her time of life, to see her disporting herself. Why, there are her niece and your own boy in the same set!"

"So are Mr. Jordan and Mrs. Martindale."

"Oh, yes, but that is nothing. Jordan must make himself useful in his own house; and every one knows Louisa is a fool, who would like to be thought gay, giddy, and dangerous. I would bet a box of gloves, now, she thinks she is breaking my heart with jealousy. Just look how she wriggles about, and how the chandelier so nearly over her head brings out the crowsfeet and wrinkles round her eyes. I would not, for fifty dollars, walk down the centre of the room when that thing is lighted, if anybody were looking.

"You don't see no crowsfeet around Matildy's eyes, I guess. She's a fine woman, is Matildy Stanley. I wonder where the man's eyes have been that she should have stayed Matildy Stanley so long. See how she walks! As upright as a broomstick, and as springy as a cane."

"Men like other things along with looks," said Amelia bridling.

"Though really Matilda looks quite nice--considering. One can scarcely claim to be in one's first youth now-a-days, and we all came out the same year, so our ages cannot be very far apart, Louisa Martindale, Matilda, and I; and Louisa and I have grown up children."

"You don't say that Mrs. Martindale is one age with Matildy? She looks nigh on twenty years older. _You're_ different," she added quickly, as the gathering of a look on her friend's face, which did not betoken satisfaction, became apparent.

"Perhaps Louisa does wear a little badly," she answered, in returning good humour. "That light betrays everything. Louisa has so much vivacity, and perhaps she is just the least bit in the world affected, I believe it must be that has made her go off so. So much simpering and smiling, when one doesn't feel so very pleased, and makes believe a good deal, must naturally wear creases in the face. Do you not think so? Matilda, on the other hand, as you know, is so calm and tranquil; her face has not half the tear and wear of Louisa's, and therefore it lasts ever so much better. But, somehow, Louisa, I should say, has got more good out of her life. She has got more bad, too, I grant, for she has been in the thick of everything; but I think I prefer that.

Matilda seemed never just to hit it off with the men. I do not recollect her ever receiving any marked attentions, and she did not betray any strong preferences to her. There are no little vignettes, that I ever heard of, to ill.u.s.trate her biography. You know what I mean. _Pa.s.sages_, people call them, which most of us like to bring out of our memories and look at, when we feel low and a little sentimental; just as we open the old box where our bridal wreath is laid away, and wonder as we wrap the thing up again in its tissue papers, if the gingerbread has really been worth all the gilding we overlaid it with."

Martha sniffed. It did not become an honest married woman to talk that way, she thought; but she said nothing, and the sniff proved enough to modulate Amelia's tone down to the narrational key again.

"When the officers were quartered here, of course it made society lively; and they paid a great deal of attention to us all,"--with just a suspicion of bridling, as she said it, as though she had "vignettes"

of her own to remember, if it were worth while to count the scalps won in such old-world encounters. "Matilda was in the thick of it all, and got plenty of attention, but it never came to anything; and I am bound to say she betrayed no anxiety that it should. Her father was an Englishman, you see, and she has travelled; and she has money, and a sister; so I suppose it comes natural to them to take things easily and be comfortable in their own cool-blooded and retired sort of way.

Very nice women, I must admit, and always the same wherever you meet them; but one cannot make free with them as we do amongst ourselves.

Really it is quite like long ago, to see Matilda dancing out there with Considine. She is little changed. Fuller in the figure, perhaps, but that is becoming as one gets up in life. Her hair is in the same old way she always wore it--in streaming side curls. 'Books of Beauty,' when I was a little girl, displayed ladies with hair-dressing like that; but, except Matilda, I never saw a living woman wear it.

Though it becomes her."

"Splendid hair! So long and thick; and not one white thread in it.

Now, what colour was Mrs. Martindale's originally? It's dun-duckety mud colour now, or what you please," and her eyes involuntarily rested on Amelia's head-dress, eliciting an angry red spot upon either cheek, which was answered by a flush of ashamed confusion on her own, at the inadvertence, and brought the conversation to an abrupt conclusion.

The unconscious subject of her friend's criticism swam here and there through the figures of her dance in sympathy with the music, borne up and carried forward, like a well-trimmed yacht, upon the current of sound. She had danced little, if at all, for years; but it came naturally to her to dance. There was no heart-heaviness or carking care, no malice, envy, or uncharitableness--the unadjustable ballast which makes so many a hull roll heavily. Her health was good, as it had always been, her nerves as well strung, and her ear as sensitive to the spirit of sound. She looked well, and she knew it, with the mature and realized beauty of a summer afternoon--a lady such as the late King George admired. There was not the dewy promise of morning, but neither were there evening's pensive shadows pointing backward in regret--a handsome woman who had shed her girlhood, but showed no other sign by which to count the years. It was pleasant to be brought down off the shelf where matrons and old ladies sit and contemplate the gambols of the young, and made her think of her first ball, and how nice it had been, but without regret, for it was nice even now; and there was her own little Muriel whom she had reared, almost grown up, and marching before her just like another woman in the evolutions of the dance. And really it was very nice to have a gentleman so attentive, and all to one's self; like long ago, before her married friends got their establishments, and put on their absurdly patronizing airs, which were sometimes so provoking, though always so ridiculous--"as if one could not have done everything _they_ succeeded in doing if one had cared to try."

That reflection brought perhaps a trifle more colour in her face, and made her shake out the ringlets just a little, till she looked at her partner before her, carefully executing with conscientious precision a gyration in her honour. She could not but smile as she gave him her hand to turn round, and the man looked positively grateful as he received it. Grateful, but was it for the smile or the hand? Yet surely he gave the hand a little squeeze. The man must be growing audacious. And yet he was so respectful. But Mr. Considine she knew was always respectful, and really very nice.

Considine thought it very nice too--did not know, in fact, how long it was since he had enjoyed anything so much. "Amazing fine woman," is how some of his compeers would have expressed their feelings; but Considine did not even pretend to be a _roue_, and he was not a fogy, though quite old enough to have been one, if that had been a necessary phase of existence to pa.s.s through. He felt happy with a respectful enjoyment, such as he might have known thirty years earlier, in the recognized season for such things, and he only regretted that it was to end so soon. He wondered if he might venture to ask her to dance again, and that smile we have mentioned, met him, and he thought he would risk it; but alas, the programme had been arranged to suit the younger talent, and this proved to be the last square dance. Then he bethought him of the subscription a.s.semblies, and wondered if Miss Stanley attended them, and then the evolutions of the next figure brought him back to the business in hand.

Muriel and her partner watched him carefully solemnizing the rite with a good deal of amus.e.m.e.nt. Youth is so graspingly exclusive, and so intolerant. It engrosses the present and claims the future for itself, and accords as little place to its quite recent predecessors, the have beens, as would be given to the ancient kings at Westminster, if they should leave their vaults in the abbey and walk across the street to the hall or the palace over the way.

CHAPTER VI.

A BENEVOLENT SPIDER.

M. Rouget de la Hache was hard up. He was a "swell," in a small way, after the mild colonial fashion, with a seigniory whose ancient privileges had been curtailed by advancing civilization; but civilization had paid him a good round sum when it abolished his rights over the persons and property of his humble neighbours--rights which were becoming an anachronism, and always more difficult to exercise. Being a swell, he did not work, but he was closely related to many who did, and who exercised the most important functions in the country, while they still looked up to him as in some sort their chief; though, in reason, the deference should have been all the other way. M. Rouget did not work, and therefore, not being a vegetable, it was necessary that he should play. When circ.u.mstances, in mistaken kindness, lay no burden on a man's shoulders, he fits one on himself--_il faut s'amuser_--and one which often proves hard to carry.

There is a taskmaster, as the nursery saw tells us, still ready to find occupation for idle hands, occupation in which they too often burn their fingers.

Guns and dogs answer well enough at a time, so do trotting horses; but by-and-by there must be other men's horses to trot with, and give the interest of emulation. A man cannot continue to amuse himself on his own land; and in colonial cities people are too busy making their fortunes to be amusing company for an idle man. However, Saratoga, in its season, was not far away, and there was New York beyond, which lasts all the year round--more or less. Rouget had been used to be "of the best" at home--a personage, in a small way, wherever he appeared--and abroad it did not occur to him to abate his pretentions.

Measured by the golden foot-rule of New York, he would have found himself on a far back bench, and even then his neighbours would have been able to lay down a dollar for every dime which he could produce; but the idea of applying such a standard did not occur to him. He believed himself a notability, and looked among the foremost for his peers. Was he not related to several of those old French governors who traded beads for peltry in the wake of a Jesuit Missionary, chaffering with the simple children of the wilderness beneath the forest shade, ere ever a vulgar common-place Englishman had arrived to cut timber, open a shop, or make money? And the foremost accepted him at his own valuation, as something "_ro_mantic, and quite beyond." He was ready to put down his stakes alongside theirs, and it would not be "manners"

to ask the size of the pile from whence the stakes were drawn.

Wherefore the American heart opened genially to receive him, just as it opens to the Lord Toms and Sir Harrys who each year enter its hospitable gates, and remain while their money lasts, or till they are found out.

It is hard upon the pipkin who adventures to sail down stream with the brazen bowls. There are eddies on the smoothest streams, and among the eddies there will be b.u.mping. Only the pipkins need mind that, it is they alone who suffer. They inevitably get cracked in a collision, while the bra.s.s goes b.u.mping and ringing along for very sport. It can come to no harm. Mr. Rouget got cracked--badly cracked--at last; but the wonder is that it had not befallen him long before. His friends did what they could for him--friends always do, when the subject is a worthless one, while virtue gets leave to shift for itself in its disasters, virtue being essentially prosaic, uninteresting and unpicturesque--but even his friends ran dry at last, and he had to mortgage his land. That occurred when Jordan began first to invest moneys for the Herkimer estate, and it was he who had bought the mortgage. It was a fairly profitable operation for Jordan, and had been the beginning of a useful intimacy; but it seemed to him, ere long, after the accruing advantages were well secured, that to sink so large a sum in so long-winded a transaction had been a mistake, and he might have done better in short loans, money on call, and general usury. There was the idea, to be sure, of engrafting his son effectually upon the dominant French interest by marriage, and if that could be compa.s.sed, it might turn out that the money had been well invested; but the boy was so head-strong and contrary, so like the Irishman's pig, which insists on going the other way, in what way soever he may be desired to go, that there was no certainty of working out the scheme, however compliant they of the other side might be.

Jordan was sitting in his office one day, in the week following his wife's party, examining his diary of bills coming due, considering where renewals might be granted, and how much he might extort in consideration of his forebearance, what sums would be paid him, and how they were to be employed. Rouget, overbearing the clerk who kept the sanctum door--it was an inner room, lined with tin boxes, but free from the professional lumber which garnished that wherein he received his clients, the spider-hole, in fact, where he sat to devour his flies, and very private--appeared before him.

"Jordain! Your clerk ees not _respectueux_. I must complain. He tell me you were gone out. Yen vid dis ear I hear you cough my ownself.

Everee body know Jordain's cough. Yet he _defend_ my entry."

Jordan laid down his pen testily, but composed himself at once. "M.

Rouget de la Hache, eh? The young man has orders to let no one in here. He should have said I was engaged. Those were his orders."

"He deed say so; but I shust look heem in ze eye--so!--vit a grand _severite_; and he fail of his word, and grow _confus_; and zen he tell me you were gone out. And so--behold me."

"Sim should stick to his orders. The first lie is always the best and safest. Not that this was a lie--he had his orders to say I was engaged, and admit no one. _You_ would have been an exception, of course, had I expected to see you. But how should I? Nevertheless, most pleased to see you; though really I am very busy. Pray sit down.

How can I serve you?"

Rouget sat down, looking vacantly about him. To attempt to hurry him, shook up his muddy wits, which needed all their accustomed rest to clarify themselves in any measure.

It was a bare little room, all but its wall covering of shelves, supporting tin boxes, which were all brown j.a.panned alike, and garnished with gold letters and numbers enough to give one headache.

There were three chairs, on one of which he was sitting, while Jordan had another, and the third stood waiting--for whom? It disturbed him, this foolish question, for it was impossible to answer it. The table was covered with black leather, and there was a book open--a big fat book--wonder what it was about?--and a bit of paper with names and figures, which Jordan was noting down with a pencil. Wonder what he meant by it? Had it anything to do with him, Jean Vincent de Paul Rouget? But yet the pencil and slip of paper looked unimportant enough, and so, with the bold a.s.surance of ignorance Rouget concluded that they could not possibly be of much consequence, and Jordan was only making believe--a humbug, in fact, as all people _la bas_ mostly were. It takes a transatlantic "swell," who has never seen one of the acknowledged great ones of the earth, to fully realize the vast inferiority of the "lower orders" to his own ineffable mightiness.

And yet it was easier to make the grand entrance he had achieved, and even to seat himself with dignity, than to plunge at once _in medias res_. He shuddered a little, like a bather on the brink, and looked round the room again, but it was so bare it would not suggest anything; and he wanted an idea--some neutral subject of talk which could be steered and edged about, whither he would; like a boat to waft him round the cliffs on the opposing sh.o.r.e, to some unguarded inlet with sloping banks, where he could land in good order and deploy at will toward the point he sought to gain. But this fellow was so abrupt. The _brusquerie_ was not in good taste, and at another time he would have let him see it; but now----

"How can I serve you?" said the spider again. He knew the value of directness and dispatch. A fly must be well inmeshed in the web to be there present. It is mercy to the poor things to come to the point with a bound, and bleed or devour. To prolong the preliminaries is but adding gratuitous pain. The victim will but flutter the more wildly, and what usurer would make rich if he heeded the remonstrance of impotence? In prolonged palaver, too, and the frantic flutterings, may not the captive burst a gossamer bond, and be free? The bonds are all gossamer, at first, like the rainbow-coloured rays of a sea anemone, but they thicken and grow tense when the prey gets among them, and do it so quietly that he is partly swallowed before he realizes his danger, and then his struggles are apt to be in vain. Still, there are chances, and vigour and dispatch are best.

"How can I serve you?" and Jordan glanced into the book before him, and then made a cross with his pencil at a name and some failures on the list he seemed to be making out. It was manifest that he guessed already what was going to be said. It was mortifying, and still it was a relief to see that preliminaries were unnecessary and the subject already opened.

"I find I cannot meet all the interest due the day after to-morrow."

A mere bow of the head from the spider. Not a motion of an eyebrow, even, in token of surprise. This composure hurt M. Rouget much. Was he not an important person, and looked upon as rich? And was it not the duty of ordinary people to expect him to pay up? He felt almost insulted that anybody should thus take his inability as a matter of course. He coloured, and looked an interrogation.

"Yes?" said Jordan.