The Debtor Part 73

"Does she know you at all, Mr. Anderson?" Carroll said, in a dazed sort of fashion.

"She knows me a little. I have, of course, seen her in my store."

"Yes."

"And once, as you may remember, she came here."

"Yes, when she had the fright from the tramp."

"She cannot know me very well, I admit."

"I don't see that you know her very well, either, for that matter."

"I know her well enough," said Anderson. "I have no doubt as far as I am concerned. My only doubt is for her, not only whether she can care sufficiently for me, but whether, if she should care, it would be the best thing for her. I am much older than she. I can support her in comfort, but not in luxury, probably never in luxury; and you know my position, that I have been forced to abandon a profession which would give my wife a better social standing. You know all that; there is no need of my dwelling upon it."

Anderson said that with an indescribable pride, and yet with a perfect acquiescence in the situation. He looked at Carroll, who remained quite pale, looking at him with an inscrutable expression of astonishment. Finally he smiled a little.

"As they say in the comic column, this is so sudden, Mr. Anderson,"

he said.

"I can well imagine so," Anderson replied, smiling in his turn. "It is rather sudden to me. Nothing was further from my intention than to say this to-night."

Carroll looked at him soberly. "Mr. Anderson, it all depends upon the child," he said. "If Charlotte likes you, that is all there is to be said about it. You are a good man and you can take care of her. As far as the other goes, I have no right to say anything. Frankly, I should prefer that you had succeeded in your profession than in your present business, on her account."

"So should I," said Anderson, gloomily.

"But it is all for her to decide. Come and call, and let matters take their course. But--I shall say nothing to her about this. A girl like Charlotte is a sensitive thing. Call and see. As far as I am concerned--" Carroll paused a second. Then he rose and held out his hand. "I have no reason whatever to object to you as a husband for my daughter, and my son-in-law," he said.

"Thank you," said Anderson.

Carroll had gone out of the door, and Anderson was just about to close it after him, when he turned back. "By-the-way, Mr. Anderson,"

he said, and Anderson understood that he was about to say what had been on his mind before and he had refrained from expressing. "I want to inquire if you have any acquaintance with the large grocery house of Kidder & Ladd, in the City?" he asked.

"A slight business acquaintance," replied Anderson, wonderingly.

"I saw," said Carroll, in an odd, breathless sort of voice, "an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a--floor-walker in that house. I wondered, in the event of my applying for it, if you would be willing to give me a letter of introduction to one of the firm, if you were sufficiently acquainted."

"Certainly," said Anderson, but he was aware that he almost gasped out the answer.

"I saw the advertis.e.m.e.nt," said Carroll again. "I have to make some change in my business, and"--he essayed a laugh--"I have to think, as we have agreed is the thing to do, of some salable wares in my possession. It did occur to me that I might make a pa.s.sable floor-walker. I have even thought of a drum-major, but there seems no vacancy in that line. If you would."

"Certainly," said Anderson again. "Would you like it now?"

"If it is not too much trouble."

Anderson hastened to the old-fashioned secretary in the sitting-room and wrote a line of introduction on a card while Carroll waited.

"Thank you," Carroll said, taking it and placing it carefully in his pocket-book. The two men shook hands again; Carroll went with his stately stride down the street. It was snowing a little. Anderson thought idly how he had not offered him an umbrella, as he saw the flakes driving past the electric light outside as he pulled down the window-curtains, but he was as yet too dazed to fully appreciate anything. He was dazed both by his own procedure and by that of the other man. It was as if two knights in a mock tourney had met, both riding at full speed. He had his own momentum and that of the other in the shock of meeting.

His mother's door opened as he went up-stairs with his night-lamp, and her head in a white lace-trimmed cap, for she still clung to the night-gear of her early youth, peered out at him.

"Who was it?" she asked, softly, as if the guest were still within hearing.

"Captain Carroll."

"Oh!"

"He came on business."

"He stayed quite awhile. You had a little call with him?"

"Yes, mother."

She still looked at him, her face, of gentle, wistful curiosity, dimly visible between the lace ruffles of her nightcap, in the door.

"He spoke of your calling there this afternoon, and he seemed much pleased," Anderson said.

"Did he?"

"Yes."

"Well, good-night, dear," said Mrs. Anderson, with an odd, half-troubled but rather enjoyable sigh. Her son kissed her, and she disappeared. She got back into bed, and put her lamp out. The electric light outside streamed into her room and brought back to her mind moonlight reveries of her early maidenhood. She remembered how she used, before she ever had a lover, to lie awake and dream of one.

Then she fell to planning how, in the event of Randolph's marrying, the front chamber could be refurnished, and the furniture in that room put in the northwest chamber, which was spa.r.s.ely furnished and little used except for storage purposes. Then the northwest room could be the guest-chamber, and Randolph's present room would answer very well for his books, and would be a study when the bed was taken down.

She had the front chamber completely refurnished when she fell asleep, and besides had some exciting and entirely victorious feminine tilts with sundry women friends who had ventured to intimate that her son had made an odd matrimonial choice. It was quite a cold night, and she wondered if that child had sufficient clothing on her bed. She was in reality, in her own way, as much in love with the girl as her son.

Chapter x.x.xVI

Carroll, in the ensuing weeks, living alone with Charlotte, endured a species of mental and spiritual torture which might have been compared with the rack and wheel of the Inquisition. It seemed to Arthur Carroll in those days as if torture was as truly one of the elements inc.u.mbent upon man's existence as fire, water, or air. He got an uncanny fancy that if it ceased he would cease.

He had all his life, except in violent stresses, that happy, contented-with-the-sweet-of-the-moment temperament popularly supposed to be a characteristic of the b.u.t.terfly over the rose. But deprive the b.u.t.terfly of the rose and he might easily become a more tragic thing than any in existence. Now Carroll was deprived of his rose, he could get absolutely none of the sweets out of existence from whence his own individuality manufactured its honey. Even Charlotte's presence became an additional torment to him, dearly as he loved her and as thoroughly as he realized what her coming back had done for him, from what it had saved him. She had given him the impetus which placed him back in his normal condition, but, back there, he suffered even more, as a man will suffer less under a surgical operation than when the influence of the anesthetics has ceased. There was absolutely no ready money in the house during those weeks except the sum which Charlotte's aunt had sent her, which was fast diminishing, and a few scattering dollars, or rather, pennies, which Carroll picked up in ways which almost unhinged his brain when he reflected upon them afterwards. Whatever he had done before, the man tried in those days every means to obtain an honest livelihood, except the one which he knew was always open, and from which he shrank with such repugnance that it seemed he could not even contemplate it and his mind retain his balance. In his uneasy sleep at night he often had a dream of that experience which had yielded him money, which might yield him money again. He saw before him the sea of faces, of the commonest American type, of the type whose praise and applause mean always a certain disparagement. He saw his own face, his proud, white face with the skin and lineaments of a proud family, stained into the likeness of a despised race; he heard his own tongue forsaking the pure English of his fathers for the soft thickness of the negro, roaring the absurd sentimental songs; he saw his own stately limbs contorted in the rollicking, barbaric dance--and awoke with a cold sweat over him. He knew all the time that that was all was left to him, but he s.n.a.t.c.hed at everything. He could not obtain the floor-walker position of which he had spoken to Anderson. He thought that possibly his fine presence and urbane manner might recommend him for a place of that sort, but it was already filled. He went to several of the great department stores and inquired if there was a vacancy. He felt that the superintendents to whom he applied regarded his good points as he might have regarded the good points of a horse.

One of them told him that if he would give his address, he would be given the preference whenever a vacancy occurred. Carroll knew that he was mentally appraised as a promising person to direct ladies to ribbon and muslin counters. He looked at another floor-walker strutting up and down the aisle, and felt sure that he could do better, and all this amused contempt for himself deepened and bored its way into his very soul. He always asked himself, with the demand of an unpitying judge, if he could not have done better for himself if he had begun at once; if he had not at the first failure drifted with no resistance, with the pleasant, easy, devil-may-careness which was in his nature along with the sterner stuff which was now upheaving and a.s.serting itself, and taken what he could, how he could. He had not, after all, had an absolutely unhappy home, although it had been founded on the sands, and although that iron of hatred of the man who had done him the wrong had been always in his soul. The life he had led had been not one of active and voluntary preying upon his fellow-men; it had been only the life of one who must have the sweets of existence for himself and those he loved, and he had gotten them, even if the flowers and the fruit hung over the garden-walls of others. Now it suddenly seemed to him that he could no longer do it, as he had done, even if the owners of the fruit and flowers should be still unawares. Curiously enough, the old Pilgrim's Progress which he had read as a child was very forcibly in his mind in these days. He remembered the child that ate the fruit that hung over the wall, and how the gripes, in consequence, seized him.

Something very like the conviction of sin was over the man, or, rather, a complete consciousness of himself and his deeds, which is, maybe, after all, the true meaning of the term. It was true that the self-knowledge had seemed to come, perforce, because it was temporarily out of his power to transgress farther; in other words, because he was completely found out; but all the same, the knowledge was there. He saw himself just as he was, had been--a great man goaded on always by the small, never-ceasing p.r.i.c.k of hatred, with the sense of injury always stinging his soul, living as he chose, having all that he could procure, utterly careless whether at the expense and suffering of others or not. Now, for the first time, he began to adjust himself in the place of others, and the adjusting produced torment from the realization of their miseries, and worse torment from realization of his own contemptibility. It really seemed as if all positions which might have been in some keeping with the man and his antecedents were absolutely out of his reach. Not a night but he read the advertising columns until he was blind and dizzy.

Every morning he went to New York and hunted. The first morning he had taken the train, he had actually to a.s.sure some of his watchful creditors that he was going to return. Then all day he wandered about the streets, making one of long lines of applicants for the vacant positions. One morning he found himself in the line with William Allbright. He recognized unmistakably the meek, bent back of the old clerk three ahead of him in the line. A book-keeper had been advertised for in a large wholesale house, and there were perhaps forty applicants all awaiting their turn. His first impulse, when he caught sight of his old clerk, was to leave the line himself; then the n.o.bility which was struggling for life within him a.s.serted itself and made him ashamed of his shame. He stood still with his head a little higher, and moved on with the slowly moving line of men which crawled towards the desk like a caterpillar. He saw Allbright turn away rejected with a feeling of pity; the old man looked dejected.

Carroll reflected with a sensation of pride that at least he did not owe him. He himself was rejected promptly after he had owned to his age. The man four behind him was chosen. He was a very young man, scarcely more than a boy, unless his looks belied him. He was distinctly handsome, with the boy-doll style of beauty--curly, dark hair, rosy cheeks, and a small, very carefully tended mustache. He wore a very long and fashionable coat, and was evidently pleasantly conscious of its flop around his ankles. His handsome face wore an expression of pert triumph as he pa.s.sed on into the inner office....

Carroll, who had lingered with an idle curiosity to ascertain who was the successful applicant, heard a voice so near his ear that it whistled. The voice was exceedingly bitter, even malignant.

"That's the way it goes, these times; that's the way it always goes,"

said the voice.

Carroll turned and gazed at the speaker, a man probably older than himself; if not, he looked older, since his hair was quite white and his carriage not so good.

"The employers nowadays are a pack of fools, a pack of fools!" said the man. His long, rather handsome face, a face which should have been mild in its natural state was twisted into a thousand sardonic wrinkles. "A pack of fools!" he repeated. "Here they'll go and hire a little whippersnapper like that every time, instead of a man who has had experience and knows how to do the work, just because he's young.

Young! What's that? You'd think what they wanted was a man to keep their books straight. I can keep books if I do say so, and that young snip can't. Lord! He was in Avin & Mann's with me. Why, I tell you he can't add up a column of figures three inches long straight, to save his neck. The books will be in a pretty state. I'll give him just ten days before they'll have to get an expert in to straighten out things. Hope they will; serve 'em right. Here I am, can't get a job to save my life, because my hair has turned and I've got a few more years over my head, and I can keep books better than I ever could in my life. Good Lord! You'd think it was what was inside a man's head they'd be after, instead of the outside." He looked at Carroll.

"Guess I've got a little the advantage of you in age," he said, "but I suppose that's the matter why you were given the cold shoulder."

"I shouldn't be surprised if you were right, sir," replied Carroll, rather apathetically. He was going through all this without the slightest hope, but only for the sake of feeling that he had done his utmost before he took up with the alternative which so dismayed his very soul. He himself looked old that morning. He had retained his youthful appearance much longer than men usually do, but as he had viewed his reflection in the gla.s.s that morning he had said to himself that he at last was showing his years. His hair had turned visibly gray in the last few weeks; lines had deepened; and not only that, but the youthful fire had given place to the apathy and weary resignation of age.