David Malcolm Part 18

And graciously she added, as he backed awkwardly away: "Remember, you must let me know when Miss Todd comes. I shall call."

CHAPTER XVIII

I dined with the Blights. It had been a month since the afternoon when I talked with Penelope, and this evening in December I went to the house with hope high that in seeing her again I might have an opportunity of regaining a little of our lost friendship. The invitation had come from her, over the telephone, to dine with them most informally, and though she cleared herself of any charge of interest in the matter by adding that Mr. Blight wished to see me, I flattered myself with the hope that she might be speaking more personally than she cared to admit. How soon was that illusion wrecked! I entered the great library. Mrs. Bannister was standing by the fireplace, her eyes fixed on the opposite wall, her mind occupied with a struggle to suppress a yawn of boredom. Rufus Blight was reading a newspaper, but when I was announced he came forward and greeted me cordially. With his arm in mine he led me to Mrs.

Bannister, and she allowed me to raise her hand and drop it. She said something, made some conventional remark on the great pleasure it gave her to see me; the yawn almost forced itself into view, but she set her lips firmly and drove it back. As I made my response to these friendly expressions of welcome my eyes swept the room and rested at last on the door through which I had come. There they held expectantly.

Mrs. Bannister read my thoughts. "Penelope is so distressed that she cannot see you to-night," she said, drawing her scarf across her bared and ma.s.sive shoulders, so that I wondered if my entrance had suddenly chilled the air. "She had expected to be here, but this afternoon the Ruyters called up and insisted that she dine with them and go to the opera. It's 'Tristan.' She is mad about 'Tristan.'"

So faded the last vain hope! Had Penelope spent hours in devising a way of making it plain to me that the link between the past and the present was broken, she could not have been more adroit. Had David Malcolm, the boy, been coming to dine that night I know that she would have been standing there at Mrs. Bannister's side, her own eyes fixed expectantly on the door. But between the company of such excellent folk as these Ruyters, with the glorious music of "Tristan," and this awkward man whose people were not her people, who found content in the lodges of the Todds and Bundys, there could be but one choice. I was humiliated. The good-natured grace with which I expressed my disappointment to Mrs. Bannister belied my angry mind, and as we moved toward the dining-room, she chattering incessantly, she must have believed that I was entirely satisfied with just her company.

Fortunately I had only to smile my responses, while my thoughts were busy with the cavalier way in which I had been treated. I was incensed at Penelope, but had it been any balm to my wounds to make her feel the weight of my anger, I knew well enough that she was far beyond the reach of my reproaches. But hopelessly I repeated over and over to myself that I never could forgive her. Then, by a sudden weak reversal, I did forgive her and let my anger evaporate into a silent protest against the unkind fate which had decreed that her people should no longer be my people.

It was when I saw her that I forgave her. As we three sat at dinner, Mrs. Bannister chattering on, Rufus Blight meditative but offering a mono-syllable now and then as evidence that he listened, I smiling responsively, Penelope came in. How could I not forgive her when I saw her thus, gowned in the daintiest art of the Rue de la Paix, cloaked in soft white fur, capped with a scarf of filmy lace, and one small hand held out to mine.

The fault, I said, was my own, mine and the Fates which had ordered that the orbits in which we moved should meet but rarely. The fault, too, lay with my forebears, who, had they considered me, would have settled on the sh.o.r.es of the Hudson instead of pushing westward so recklessly. Then I might now be going to the Ruyters', to sit at dinner at her side, to sit behind her in the shadow of an opera-box and whisper in her ear the ten thousand things which I had to say. I forgave Penelope. I called down maledictions on the robust Malcolms and McLaurins who had carried me out of her world and abandoned me to the garrulous Mrs. Bannister and the taciturn Rufus Blight.

Penelope was exceedingly sorry to be going out, but she knew that David would understand and would come some other night. David understood thoroughly; there was no reason for her to apologize, and, of course, he would come again. Penelope was immensely relieved to find him so complacent; she even wished he were to be of the company to which she was going. She had just come in to have a glimpse of him, and now she must be hurrying. And so she went away to take her bright place in that social firmament of which the abandoned Mr. Malcolm thought with so much envy and longing while he dallied again with sweetbreads and peas.

"It was very late when I got home," said Mrs. Bannister, taking up the thread of her narrative, "and who should I find here, as usual, but Herbert Talcott!"

The emphasis which she put on the words "as usual" aroused Mr. Blight from his placid interest in his gla.s.s of claret. "And who," said he, "is Talcott, anyway? What does he do?"

"Herbert Talcott is a remarkable man," replied Mrs. Bannister. "He does nothing."

It should have mattered little to me that Herbert Talcott refused tea from Penelope's hands every day of the week because he had just come from the club. Had Mrs. Bannister announced that he was calling daily on Gladys Todd, then I should very properly have been startled. Yet I sat up straight now as though she had named an archenemy of my happiness and my ears were keen to hear every word.

"He does absolutely nothing," she continued. "He has absolutely nothing, in spite of the reports that he is quite well off. I know positively that his father left him only ten thousand a year, and yet he knows everybody and goes everywhere. He is undeniably clever and was a great favorite at Harvard."

"Doesn't he work at all?" said Mr. Blight with a rising inflection of astonishment.

"Why, no," replied Mrs. Bannister. She saw the disapproval in my host's face and was quick to bring herself into sympathy. "That is what I can't understand. Now, there is Bob Grant, who is very rich in his own right, and yet goes religiously down to the Stock Exchange every day because he feels an obligation to be of some use in the world. But of the two men, Herbert Talcott is the more sought after."

"Sought after?" said my host inquiringly.

"Yes, sought after," repeated Mrs. Bannister. "He is asked everywhere.

I suppose his name has something to do with it, but in these days, when name counts for so little and money for so much, it is remarkable."

"It is remarkable," said Rufus Blight, with a return to the spirit of the day when I had known him as a bustling, pompous man. "It is remarkable that he can be happy doing nothing. Look how restless I am with nothing to do but to play golf and read magazines. I can't understand him. And yet he seems a decent young man."

"But, you must remember, he is going out all the time," said Mrs.

Bannister. "A man simply couldn't go out as he does and do anything.

He is always in demand. Why, I know a dozen families into which he would be heartily welcomed. Last year it was reported that he was engaged to marry Jane Carmody, the mine man's daughter; but she was rather plain--to be truthful, very plain--and I will say for Herbert Talcott that he is not the kind who would marry solely for money."

Mrs. Bannister went on chattering her praise of Herbert Talcott, with a subtle purpose, I suspected, of impressing on me the utter absurdity of my entering the lists with him and of bringing Rufus Blight to a keener appreciation of the man whom he might be called on any day to welcome into his own family. With me her efforts were quite unneeded. With Rufus Blight the impression which she seemed to create was alone one of astonishment that any man could be happy doing nothing. Again and again he interrupted her to express his doubt on that point, and when dinner was over and Mrs. Bannister had retired, and we were smoking in the room which he called his den, he unmasked to me a mind weary of working over nothing. He should never have sold out to the trust, he said; in the mills he had been happy; every hour had its task and every day its victories in orders for rails and armor-plate. Now in a single day every month he could cut coupons and attend to dividends, and the others he must pa.s.s with golf and magazines.

His den? How quickly does this bourgeois phrase call up before us a hodgepodge room, an atmosphere of stale tobacco smoke, a table covered with pipes, books and magazines, littered with tobacco, walls burdened with hideous prints, a mantel adorned with objects dear to their owner from their a.s.sociations, to the visitor hideous. The alien mind which had conceived the great library had evidently been held at bay when Rufus Blight was fitting himself into this den, his real home.

Over the fireplace was a great steel plate of the regretted mills, a world covered with immaculate smokeless buildings and cut with streets in which women were taking the air in barouches as though in a park; before the fireplace two patent rockers, and behind them a table littered with magazines and novels; in the corners golf sticks of innumerable designs, and wherever the eye turned it met coldly colored prints showing trotting horses in action. I had one of the rocking-chairs and Rufus Blight the other, and he was looking up at the mills when he spoke so regretfully of them. He referred again to Talcott.

"I can't understand it--a man happy doing nothing. I suppose I am a sort of machine--I must have work fed into me. Here I am at fifty-five and not a wheel moving. It was the power of the mills that kept me running. Now I have lost that." For a moment he was silent. Then he leaned toward me and said in a wistful voice: "David, you remember my brother. He could be happy just sitting thinking. Now if my energy could have been combined with his mentality, what----"

I finished the sentence. From the past came the picture of the Professor at the bare table in the cabin, pointing a long finger at me.

"What a man we would have made."

Rufus Blight's eyes opened wide. "How did you read my thoughts so well!" he exclaimed.

"The conclusion was simple," said I. "Years ago I heard your brother say the same thing."

"Oh! Well it does express the case exactly. Henderson was always a wonderful man for thinking, David. In his young days he was perfectly happy with a book. There were not many books in our valley, but he read them all and it was very interesting to hear the ideas he formed from them. He was a wonderful talker." Rufus Blight nodded his head reminiscently. "A wonderful talker. But when it came to practical things he was quite helpless. It wasn't that he was lazy. If there had been at hand anything big to do, anything that appealed to him, he would have done it. What he needed was an opportunity. He really never had half a chance. He did try working in the store with me--and he tried hard, but a mind like his could not be happy measuring out sugar and counting eggs. Such work seemed to lead to nothing--I know it did to me. But I had a different kind of a mind. I had to feed it, like a machine, with figures and facts. But to him it was of no importance that b.u.t.ter had gone up a cent a pound. He would say that the ants weren't worried about it, nor the birds, nor the people of other planets. Do you know, David, I really used to envy Hendry his way of seeing things."

For a few moments Rufus Blight was silent, and my eyes were on the picture of the great mills to which the counting of sugar and eggs had led. From the mills they wandered to what they had given the man who built them, from the golf sticks to the prints of trotting horses and to the litter on the table. This den measured the true extent of his conquest. I looked at him. With a movement of weariness he stretched his feet toward the fire and leaned back and gazed at the ceiling, with a whimsical smile playing around the corners of his mouth.

"I had to work, David," he went on. "Hendry could earn a living teaching school, but I hadn't the brains, so I toiled away in the store from early morning until late at night. Teaching school was easier.

He used to say that if the sluggard did actually go to the ant he would probably find him a most uninteresting creature to talk to. I guess Hendry was right. I do know that he had little of the virtue of the ant, but he was one of the most interesting men I ever heard talk.

When I was behind the counter it was my main pleasure to listen to him, perched on a chair in front of it." Rufus Blight laughed. "Really, David, in those days I was proud of having such a distinguished brother. I had always looked up to him. He was older than I, four years, and he was my protector against the a.s.saults of other lads--my ready compendium of universal knowledge. I never dreamed but that if I prospered he would prosper; and if he, then I. Why, David, I can feel him now clapping me on the back and calling me his grub-worm. 'Some day,' he would say, 'I'll come and ask a bed in your garret.' And I would laugh at him and talk of the time when we--I always said 'we'--when we should have a pair of fine trotters, and should go skimming over the country together instead of crawling along behind our blind mare." Rufus Blight paused. The whimsical smile was gone and he was looking at me through narrowed eyes. "Then the break came." And quickly, as he said it, he turned from me and began to smoke very hard.

"The break?" said I in a questioning tone; for I believed that at last I was to know the mystery which lay behind the Professor's conduct if only I could lead him on.

"Yes," said he in an even voice, "the break. The break came and I had to leave the valley. I wouldn't stay after that, David. There was nothing left for me there, but I had my work; I could go on weighing b.u.t.ter and counting eggs." Rufus Blight's voice was low and he spoke rapidly. He seemed to have it in his mind that I knew the story of those early days, had heard it, perhaps, from the lips of his brother or from common report, for men are p.r.o.ne to think their fellows well informed of the conspicuous facts of their lives. I dared not interrupt again for an explanation, lest my question should betray me to him as nothing more than a curious stranger. I know the story now in all its detail, but it came to me only from Rufus Blight, and from him in a few scattered threads, dropped for me to weave while in his den that night; feeling that he had found one whom he could trust, he unburdened his heart. Doubtless he had no such thought when he led me into the room, but there might have been in my eyes, when he spoke of the valley, some light of sympathy. And when he turned from that great hall, from his heavy table and his liveried servants, to speak of counting eggs and weighing b.u.t.ter, I had not even smiled at the incongruity. Then the dam broke, and memories backed up in years of silence broke forth in a quick and troubled flood.

"It was my fault, David, as much as his. I was a grub--a dull, toiling grub. But those long hours that I was toiling came to be good hours for me when it was for her sake. Why, it seemed that every pound of sugar I sold, that every little profit I made, was for her. I planned the finest house in the country as I stood all day at the counter, and it was for her. She was to have it all, and I only asked to be allowed to grub away--for her. She didn't understand me, David. She used to taunt me with being sordid, and said that I stayed at the store early and late because I loved a dollar most. I didn't understand women. I guess at least I should have closed up the store for an evening or two a week, and yet"--Rufus Blight hesitated--"and yet it wouldn't have made any difference. Hendry was a tall fellow. I was short and rather fat. Hendry could talk in a wonderful way. I was always silent except when it came to a trade. It had to be as it was, David, but it was hard--very hard. I don't think I said any more than most men would have said to him--perhaps less, because I never was a talker. And, after all, I couldn't blame them. Why, I remember, as I was leaving the valley, I said to him that if they ever needed a home they must come to me. He was offended. He drew himself up and said proudly that when I needed help I must come to them. Poor Hendry! It wasn't long before he did need help; but could you imagine him taking it from any one? He lost the school--he had become not quite orthodox in his ideas and was inclined to rail at church doctrine. He never was intended for manual labor; he worked hard when he could get work, but everything seemed against him. Then Penelope came, and he was left alone with her, and it made him bitter. I tried to get him to come to me; but could you imagine a man as proud as he, David--a man of his mind--coming to me after what had happened! Why, he called my offer charity. Then he left the valley, too, and I wrote to him from Pittsburgh, where I had bought a little mill. I wanted them to come to me--him and Penelope--for I was lonely. I had nothing but the mill; why, only in the mill was I happy. But could you imagine a man as proud as he, David, taking help from me? He answered rather curtly; said that some day I should see what he was worth; that he was not the idler he seemed. He said that again to me face to face, that once when I have seen him in all the years since the break."

Rufus Blight left his chair and stood by the fireplace, a hand on the mantel, his eyes watching the flames.

"Could I have done more, David? That night when I saw him I had come in from the mills late, and the servants would not let him wait for me even in the hall. He told me how he had shot the constable. He feared he had killed him, but he did not know, not daring to turn back to find out. He had walked the whole way, travelling day and night. I wanted him to stay, but he said that in Mary he had taken from me everything I had ever had; he could take no more. He had come not to beg, but to give me Penelope; and when he came again it would not be as a brother who could be turned from my door by the servants; when he came again it would be as a father of whom Penelope could feel no shame. I could not move him. I did my best, David, but he laughed and slapped me on the back and called me his old grub; said that some day I should really see what was in him. Then he went away--G.o.d only knows where."

"To the West," said I. "To the East, to Tibet."

"Yes," said Rufus Blight. He was standing before me, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes intent on the ceiling.

"And you came to us for Penelope," I said. The last trace of my antipathy to this man, once to me so fat and pompous, was gone.

He looked at me with a faint smile of embarra.s.sment. "And what an ungrateful brute I was!" he exclaimed. "David, did you remember the promises I made that day?"

"I used to remember them," I answered, "and to wonder."

"You had the right," he said. "But remember what I was--just a lonely grub. Till Penelope came to me I had nothing but the mills. Having her, I wanted her entirely." He held out his hand. "She was only that high, David, and I was getting gray. I never looked at her but there came into my mind another just that high who had a desk in school in front of mine, and sometimes I seemed to be looking again over the top of my spelling-book at the same bright hair and the same bobbing bit of ribbon. Can't you see what she meant to me, David? She hated me at first--she spoke always of her father and of you--and I was jealous."

"I understand," said I.

He had not spoken of the letters. There was no need of it. I knew that they were in his mind and that he was perfectly conscious of the pettiness of his action. But for me his simple confession had absolved him.

"I wanted her entirely," he went on, throwing himself into a chair at my side. "I wanted something to live for beside the mills. In Penelope I found it. What the mills gave me was for her. Every hour I worked was happier because it was for her good. Sometimes I have to fight against a dread that Hendry will come back and take her from me, and yet when I think of him, tumbling around the world alone, I want him too--want him in that very chair you are sitting in. It would be so good just to hear him talk, and it wouldn't make any difference to us now if he did just talk." Rufus Blight brought a fist down on the arm of his chair. "David, I must find him!"

"He went to Tibet," said I.

"To the South Seas, to the Arctic, to Tibet--everywhere, David. His trail has led me all over the world. I can never catch up to him. The Philadelphia man you told me of--Hara.s.san--dead three years. My secretary, Mallencroft, has found that in San Francisco a man named Henderson worked on _The Press_ there, but only two men remembered him.