David Malcolm Part 20

Poor Talcott! I confessed to myself that it would have given me pleasure to have had some part in his chastis.e.m.e.nt, and as we plodded westward through the empty streets I pictured him driving home in a hansom, trying to gather his scattered wits and to discover some reason why a quiet, respectful waiter should have a.s.sailed him without cause.

Poor muddled Talcott! He did not know that his betrayer had been distilled in far-off Scotland, and had lain away in vats a score of years awaiting that very moment to make him speak his honest thought just as the quiet, respectful waiter was bending behind him to pick up crumbs. Perhaps he could not even remember what he was saying when he was stopped by the long fingers which were thrust down the back of his neck. Did he remember, what he was saying could be none of the waiter's affair, anyway. It could matter nothing to that humble creature if he did speak of Rufus Blight as a vulgar little brute and of Penelope as "a bit raw, but worth marrying for her money alone." "A woman's millions never grow _pa.s.se_," was an aphorism which fitted the lips of the half-drunken cynic. To be sure, the things which he had said were not such as a man would give expression to were he cold sober, even if he thought them, and much less would he apply them to particular persons, yet when you are sitting late at night with such a good fellow as Bob Grant over your fifth Scotch and soda, you are likely to be a little unguarded. For who would think of a waiter objecting? Poor, muddled, drunken Talcott! He did not know that he really had given the first blow, had changed the obsequious waiter into a fury by striking him in the heart of his pride. And to such a fury had the Professor been wrought, and so firmly did anger hold his mind, that my own sudden interference was received by him as quite in the ordinary, though he protested against my good offices. He remonstrated indignantly when I acquiesced in O'Corrigan's a.s.sertion that my humble friend must be demented, a plea which opened a way out of the predicament. Fortunately, the Professor's own wisdom in refusing an explanation of an apparently unprovoked a.s.sault gave color to this theory, and as Talcott's one clear thought was to escape without any unpleasant notoriety, O'Corrigan satisfied his ire by ordering his mad employee out of the place.

So the Professor came into my charge. Had we met after a separation of only a day, his treatment of me could not have been more casual. He consented to my accompanying him home, but this seemed less from a desire to see me again than to protest against my having publicly humiliated him by treating him as demented. He had always thought that David Malcolm would understand him under every circ.u.mstance; that whatever his condition and whatever mine, when we met again it would be with mutual esteem. Yet David Malcolm had judged him by his clothes, had given him a waiter's heart and mind with a waiter's garb! He was bent on proving to me that, however low he might have fallen in the world's eye, he was as sane as he ever had been, and that in accepting O'Corrigan's opinion so readily I had done him a wrong.

Now when we were sitting in his room, so close that our knees touched, he seemed by his silence to tell me that he had spoken, and that my part was to excuse and to explain what he deemed a reflection on himself. I saw him in his shabby waiter's garb. This was the uniform in which he marched, moved night after night with shuffling feet and eyes alert lest he break the dishes--marched to the divine drumbeat, marched under G.o.d's sealed orders. His own high-flowing phrases came back to me, and I could have laughed, seeing him, but I remembered that those phrases had been the sabre cuts which drove me into action, that but for them I might be dozing like the very dogs, dozing with the unhappy restlessness of enforced inaction. Perhaps I was moving to barren conquests, but barren conquests are better than defeat. He had moved to defeat, and I pitied him. He asked of me excuse and explanation. I, having none to give, was silent. But I think he must have seen in my eyes something of the same light which he found in them that morning in the smoky cabin. Then he had reached down, taken me in his arms and called me his only friend. Now with a sudden movement he held out his hand to mine. Anger was gone. He had forgotten Talcott.

He had forgotten the stranger who seized his arm and thwarted his fury.

He saw only the boy who yesterday had stood at his side when every man's hand was against him.

"Davy--Davy," he cried, "you have come again to help me."

"Yes--to take you home," said I, "to your brother and Penelope."

He made a gesture of dissent and his eyes narrowed. "No," he returned with sharpness. "That cannot be. Don't you suppose that I should have gone to them of my own accord had it been possible?"

"But it is possible," I said. "They want you. I have it from their own lips."

"I know--I know," he replied. "Rufus would give me a home. Rufus would give me money--all I need a hundred times over. But is that what I really need? I want to do something myself, David--to be somebody myself. I have it in me. All I ask is an opportunity." He brought his fist down on his knee. "And by heaven, I will find it! I will show them I'm not the worthless fellow I seem."

"But they don't think you worthless, Professor," said I, addressing him as I might have, had we been in the cabin again. "They have been searching for you everywhere----"

"But never expecting to find me as I am now," he interrupted, spreading wide his arms and inviting me to behold him as he was, a shabby waiter.

"Rufus, who has made what the world calls a success, would be proud of me; and Penelope, who has learned to think with the rest of the world, would be proud of me--proud to present me to her friends--to splendid fellows like Talcott and his muddle-headed companion." He leaned forward and tapped me on the knee with his long forefinger, and his face broke into a bitter smile as he spoke more quietly. "David, I have seen Penelope. I came to New York just to be near her, and many a night I have stood for hours across the street from her house only to get a glimpse of her. And sometimes as I see her stepping in or out of her carriage I say to myself that she cannot be my daughter; and if I spoke to her how high she would toss her head! Why, she would lose less caste by walking with Talcott drunk than with me as I am now."

"But she need not see you as you are now," I protested, half smiling at the incongruous picture which he had drawn of Penelope walking down the avenue by the side of this shabby waiter. "They need not even know----"

I paused to grasp at some inoffensive phrase in which to describe his forlorn condition.

"That I have fallen so low," he exclaimed. He had been quick to see my predicament, and laughed. "I know what you are thinking of, David.

You saw me an obsequious, tip-grasping fellow, with a spirit as heavy as his feet. You think me broken and down and out." The hands spread wide again. "I--down and out? Why, Davy, I've been like this a score of times, and I am still game. You must not think that because of a little temporary embarra.s.sment I am in prime condition to go crawling to Rufus and tell him that I have failed and need his help. I told Rufus that I would come back and claim Penelope when she could be proud to own me as her father." He brought his fist down on his knee again.

"She couldn't be very proud now, but I'll show them!"

It was hard to combat so overwhelming a pride as this, a pride which seemed to thrive in the ashes of hope. I tried to break it by speaking of his brother and daughter, giving him an account of my renewed acquaintance with them and of their talk of him. The effect was to set him smoking a very black pipe. Rising and leaning over the foot-rail of the bed, much as in the old days he leaned lazily over the store counter, he held his eyes fixed on mine, and smoked while I argued. He was a patient listener. My own story was interwoven with his, and that he might understand my relations with his brother and Penelope, I told him briefly all that had occurred with me since that day when we parted in the clearing. When I came to the college lecture, and my efforts to see him then, and to find him, he made a motion as though to interrupt.

I paused. He commanded me to go on, and the smile which came to his face at my mention of his discourse on "Life" held there until I had finished. But my story, intended to give force to my arguments for him to surrender his pride, only served to put him in a reminiscent mood.

"That was a lecture, wasn't it, David?" he said, laughing. "Why, do you know that when I talked that night I almost imagined that I was a success in life. It was the introduction that did it--distinguished traveller--famous journalist. And you, I suppose, accepted it all as truth. Still, you may be thankful you didn't have to hear Hara.s.san--a gigantic windbag, if there ever was one. I fell in with him one day in a smoking-car and got to talking about my travels. He was preparing a lecture on China, and as he had never been there, I was useful, so he took me into his house until he had pumped me dry. I subst.i.tuted for him that night at your college for half the fee--was to read his lecture, but when I got started on it I couldn't stand it. An astonishing man, Hara.s.san! When he died he left a modest fortune made in spouting buncombe; and yet--" The Professor held out a hand in appeal. "How many men are called great because they succeed in talking buncombe and selling rubbish! That is what discourages me so; and doesn't it make you a little bitter when you meet men surrounded by every material evidence of success and go fishing in their brains and can't hook up a single original idea of any kind? Why, I've met hundreds of them, Davy. Now that night Hara.s.san would have hurled at you a lot of pompous commonplaces, and you would have hailed him as a great and wise man. I broke from the beaten path. I told you plain truth. Was I ever asked to lecture again? People won't pay to hear plain truth, Davy. I suspect that I should have done better had I not been trying all my life to drive plain truth into unwilling ears."

"I suspect so, too," said I mildly.

He laughed at my ready acquiescence. "I started wrong at home," he went on. "Had I listened to Rufus and plodded along in his humdrum way, I suppose I'd be rich now. But I couldn't. After I left the valley I went to Kansas and really settled down, got a school to teach, and for a time I was quite in the way of becoming a successful educator--princ.i.p.al of a high-school, perhaps. I might even have become president of a college, but to die the head of a fresh-water college did not seem a very glorious end; nor did teaching a lot of foolish young men to live what are held successful lives seem very inspiring living. So I went on west to San Francisco and tried newspaper work. It seemed just the vocation for me. Here I could use my sword against the dragons of untruth and corruption. The beast stalks forth brazenly enough, and without considering the moral side at all, it is sport to attack him. To get myself into a position to attack him, I had to serve an apprenticeship. You know what that means--the daily digging for ephemeral facts. But I stuck to it. I saw the day when I should be the most feared man on the coast, wielding a pen as efficacious as a surgeon's knife. Unfortunately, my knife first struck a politician named Mulligan, who owned some stock in the paper. You know the result. I could direct my caustic pen against O'Connor or Einstein, but from Mulligan came my living. I took to the sea to breathe purer air, sailing as supercargo on a trading vessel.

For two years I knocked about the South Sea Islands and along the coast of Asia, and it seemed that I was gathering a vast amount of information which would be of service to the race if preserved in a book. How I worked over that book! When I got back to San Francisco I saw my fame and fortune about to be made by it. At last the power to do something worth while was in my reach."

The Professor paused. He spread wide his arms in a gesture to express futility. "I had as well stood on the highest peak of the Rockies and read my ma.n.u.script to s.p.a.ce. The distinguished traveller and author!"

With a hand upon his heart, he bowed gravely. "The author of one thousand volumes of uncut leaves. Useless! Well, I suppose Hara.s.san found the one I gave him of some service, for he got most of his famous Chinese lecture out of it. There was some pretty good stuff in that book, too, but Hara.s.san was the only man I ever heard of who agreed with me; and he--well, he was a successful idiot."

"And of course you never shared the benefits he reaped," said I.

"Benefits from Hara.s.san?" The Professor laughed. "Why, David, you might have thought that I had ruined Hara.s.san from the way he talked when he received a letter from Todd, that president of yours. Todd said that I would subvert the morals of the country. So the Reverend Valerian and I parted with words--he to go to China in his mind, I to work my way there in the body." The Professor rested himself on the bed, and between puffs at his pipe continued: "I had an idea of going to Tibet. That seemed to be really doing something--to go to Lhasa and unveil its mysteries to the world. I started from Peking, afoot mostly, and so you see I didn't make very rapid progress, and while walking I had plenty of time to think. When I was about half-way to the border, the absurdity of the thing came to me--spending years to get into Tibet, only to find there a filthy land ruled by a mad religion. I got almost to Shen-si, and turned back. Somehow China suited me. I fell into the Chinese way of thinking, and might have gone on satisfied with a daily dole of rice and fish had it not been for Penelope. I never could forget Penelope. Always, it seemed to me, she must be waiting for me to come back with my promises fulfilled, to return a man she could be proud to own her father. It looked pretty black for me then, David. China isn't a place to accomplish much, and I might as well have gone on to Lhasa as to do what I did--work three years in the consulate at Che-Foo as interpreter and useful man, eyes, arms, and brains for a politician from Missouri. But my one purpose was to get home, to see Penelope, to see her a woman grown, and perhaps--I would say to myself sometimes--to speak to her."

"And you have found her a woman grown," said I. "Now you have only to speak to her."

He shook his head. "I've been here three months now, David, and I have seen her perhaps a score of times; and when I see her, sometimes entering that great house, sometimes driving in her carriage, always the very picture of the ideal princess, she seems a creature of another world than mine, and I laugh at myself for trying to believe that there ever was a time when she sat on my knees and talked of days to come when we should have a house like that and drive in such a carriage!

Would she understand me now? Would temporary necessity condone my descending to this uniform? I tried to do better when I came here, but I couldn't. I tried even your profession, but they wanted young men.

I came to this only to be near her. But I am away again, David. I must be up and doing." He had risen, and was speaking rapidly as he paced the narrow limits of the room. "Money is what I need and I will have it. Money has always seemed to me a paltry thing to work for, but now it is for Penelope's sake. There has been a plan in my mind for some time, David, only I have delayed starting on it--for Penelope's sake, you understand. I'm going to Argentina. There was a man on my ship coming out from Yokohama who was bound for Argentina, and he told me----"

The Professor launched into a glowing account of the promise of the southern country. To his mind, he had only to reach it to acquire the wealth which he wanted. The man who had failed in every undertaking, who had turned back from every goal to which he had set his eyes, would win there in a few years that for which men in other parts of the world strove a lifetime. I pointed out that the opportunity lay right at his hand, and his answer was to spread wide his arms that I might see the waiter's jacket. He had the better of the argument, but the reason lay in his own character. Then I had recourse to pleading, and my plea was made not for his sake, but for Penelope's, for only when I spoke of her would he listen. I tried to show him Penelope's danger, as it had been revealed to us that very night in Talcott's drunken talk. His reply was a laugh. He had so idealized Penelope that it was inconceivable that she should fall a victim to the attentions of such a vapid creature. He had not seen, as I had, Talcott sober and correct in deportment. He had not fallen, as I had, under the spell of Talcott's easy manner when he had just dropped in from the club to talk of last night's dance and to-morrow's opera. He did not know, as I did, that the whole company from whom Penelope might choose a mate were to the outward eye just such commonplace men whose power of fascination lay in commonplace deeds and words. The Professor, whose whole life had been spent pursuing shadows, was naturally of a romantic turn of mind, and it was even difficult for him to conceive of Penelope marrying at all.

That she could be inveigled into so grave a step with a man whose sole claim to merit was well-cut clothes and a command of social _patois_ was quite beyond his comprehension. In vain I argued that most women married just such men, and perhaps it was because the s.e.x had attained wisdom with experience, had discovered that a brilliant mind on parade might be amusing, but that, like its duller fellows, it retired to barracks and found contentment in the same humdrum existence as they.

The birth of eternal, enduring love was but a matter of propinquity.

Sitting on the front doorstep of an afternoon talking and strolling down to the drugstore every evening for soda-water, Darby and Joan discovered that existence apart was worse than death. And so might Joan's richer sister in the old carved chair, under the eyes of Reynolds's majestic lady, grow accustomed to the coming and going of Darby's richer brother, confirm herself in the habit of taking narcotic conversation, talk of last night's dinner and to-morrow's dance, until he seemed to become essential to her existence. All this I explained to the Professor. He retorted that I had grown cynical. Perhaps I had grown cynical, but my cynicism was born of experience--bitter experience, I called it then. Perhaps, imbittered by my own thwarted hopes, I exaggerated the danger in which Penelope stood. Perhaps, in my own vanity and jealousy, I magnified Talcott's sins, knowing well enough that, after all, he was no worse than most of his brothers. Yet there was a danger, and its avoidance was simple could I only induce the man before me to abandon his foolish pride. At least, said I, his brother should know of the night's occurrence.

"Know that, after all my boasts, I had come to waiting in a restaurant and quarrelling with drunken boys?" he cried, shaking his head and waving an arm to deny my demand. "Of course, if there were any possibility of Penelope marrying that fool it would be different. But, David, I know Rufus. He is not brilliant, but he is shrewd, and I'll trust him to find out if anybody is after his money. And Penelope?

Haven't I seen Penelope many a night stepping into her carriage--don't you think I can trust her to look higher than that?"

I could not change him, though we argued until dawn came. Then we walked together, in the gray of the early morning, from the poor quarter where he lived to Miss Minion's, a house that had grown in my eyes, by contrast, palatial. The street was still deserted, and standing by my door I made a last appeal. But he shook his head.

"Davy, can't you understand?" he said, as he took my hand in parting.

"I admit that I have been a failure up to date, but Rufus and Penelope are the last people in the world that I want to know it, and I'll trust you to be discreet. Some day it may be best to tell them, but at present, no. Silence, David; I have your promise. I'm to have one more chance in Argentina, and if I fail you have your way; but I won't fail."

He turned from me and stood very straight. His overcoat collar was b.u.t.toned to the neck, hiding the uniform of his adversity. For a moment, as I watched him, he seemed to be in the gulch again; we looked over the towering walls of brick and stone, and to me they were the ridge-side, dark and sombre in the gray light; we looked beyond the crest of it, beyond the chimneys, the tall pines which pierced the sky-line, and our eyes rested on a flake of cloud. I think it must have been there. I felt the pressure of his hand.

"I'll not be gone long, Davy," he said. "I'm coming back very soon, and till then you will take care of Penelope; won't you, boy?"

CHAPTER XXI

Spring came and with it the Todds. All that winter they had been so far from me, often so far from my thoughts even, that the remembrance of them would bring a shock like a sudden consciousness of sin or the recollection of a duty left undone. My fiancee's communication with me had dwindled to a weekly post-card. At first these had carried to me some little hint of affection, but latterly Gladys had contented herself with commonplace scrawls announcing that this was where they were staying for a few days or that the window in the hotel marked with a cross was hers. And my replies, so conscientiously written every Sat.u.r.day night, had become rather brief and formal statements of facts.

I had long since ceased to take Miss Minion's stairs two steps at a time in my eagerness to secure the portly epistle from abroad; the post-card which had filled its place I regarded with languid interest.

You can imagine, then, that it was with surprise that I found, one evening in May, a fat letter directed to me in the tall, angular hand.

The reading of it was like a blow which restored me to my senses. I had awakened to find myself not only engaged but on the verge of marriage. The Todds were coming home!

If my fiancee had neglected me for many months, she now overwhelmed me with sixty closely written pages of devotion. It was as though on coming face to face with steamer tickets she, too, had awakened from a dream and found herself engaged. It might well be true that the few weeks in London before embarking on the homeward stage had been her first opportunity to sit down with pen and paper to have what she called "a talk" with me. A year before that talk would have been highly gratifying and flattering, but now I read with a critical eye, and while I could find no fault with the sentiments expressed, the form of the expression irritated me. It was natural that the sentiment pent up in those months of hurried sight-seeing should break forth in this moment of leisure, but to me, grown practical, the form would have been more effective if direct and simple. In those days Penelope was so distant from me, so cold and implacable, that I might have turned to Gladys Todd with a thought that here at last was peace, an end of absurd and inordinate ambition, and perhaps content. Had she written to me simply that she was coming home, I might have soothed myself with the idea that I, too, was going home, back to the simple ways to which I was born, back, after all, to my own people. But Gladys Todd, grown more cultured than ever in the grand tour and revealing her mind in poetical phrases, was as much a being of another world than mine as was Penelope set in her frame of costly simplicity. I should go to the pier to meet her, I said. I knew that it could not be gladly, but I was bound by a sense of honor, by the remembrance of four years through which she had waited for me so patiently, always cheerful and firm in her faith in my power to win a home for us both. Because I was so bound, I vowed that she should never know the change in me, and then if I set myself to the task I might fan into flame the dead embers of my boyish infatuation.

So I stood on the pier that May morning when the Todds came home. So grim was my determination that I might have stood there with a smiling, expectant face had I not in that very hour seen Penelope. I had held to that cherished custom of mine to begin my day with a walk up-town, for always there was a bare chance that I might have a glimpse of her.

There was poor consolation in her pa.s.sing bow; but I could not let her go altogether out of my existence, and even her distant greeting served to keep me in the number of her acquaintances. This day I wanted to take a formal farewell, as if in doffing my hat I renounced all my claims, abandoned all my idle dreams, and set myself to the right path.

Of course, I met her, and for a time I had cause to regret that I had not taken the direct way to the pier, for Penelope that morning, as she drove by me rapidly down the avenue, was the embodiment of loveliness, a loveliness beyond the reach of him whom fortune held to the sidewalk.

Her horses seemed to step with pride at being a part of such a perfect turnout, and the men on the box to have turned to statues by the congealing of their self-importance. Seeing her, erect, a slender, quiet figure in filmy black, with a white-gloved hand on her parasol, you forgave the horses for lifting their feet so mincingly and the men for staring before them with such hauteur. She whirled by me in all that costly simplicity. I doffed my hat. She saw me and, strangely enough, smiled at me more kindly than in many days. I watched until even the men's tall hats were lost in the maze at Twenty-third Street, and as I watched I said my silent farewell to Penelope Blight.

On the pier, in the cheering, expectant throng that watched the steamer turning into her dock, I leaned on my cane and fixed my eyes with resolution on the ship which was bringing me a life of happiness. But I was silent as I pondered over the radiant smile with which I had been greeted as the carriage swept by. A week ago Penelope had given her head just a tilt of recognition; this morning she had seemed genuinely glad to see me, as though it were a pleasure to know that I lived in the same world. This afternoon, I said forgetfully, I would call upon her again--I had not called for so long. Then I heard my name. I came back to the pier and the cheering crowd, and, looking up, saw Gladys Todd.

Beside me there was a young man who brandished his cane to the peril of his neighbors' heads while he shouted again and again to his inamorata.

My duty was to evince just such joy, but when I tried to call her name my lips refused to form it, and I only raised my hat and smiled.

Gladys, standing by the ship's rail, waved her hand at me. Then she seemed to forget me entirely, and turned to a youngish-looking, stout man at her side.

The stout man began to interest me, because Gladys had written to me that she would be on deck this day straining her eyes to the sh.o.r.e where her knight would be waiting. Now it seemed as though a brief glance at her knight was sufficient, and that she found more charm in this portly fellow traveller.

Ex-Judge Bundy had small side-whiskers, and always wore a large derby and a frock coat, sometimes black, sometimes pale gray. This youngish-looking stout man was clean shaven, and he had the ruddy skin of the out-of-doors. His hat was brown felt, with its crown wound around with a white pugree--a rather affected hat, but it harmonized with his rough gray tweeds. His appearance was English; he might be, I thought, the governor of some island colony. But when he raised himself from the rail on which he had been leaning, slipped one hand into the breast of his coat, and turned to address Doctor Todd, speaking as though he were Jupiter and the doctor Mercury disguised in dingy clerical clothes, I recognized the patron of my alma mater.