The Little Lady of the Big House Part 5

"You mean I can't touch a penny without your permission?"

"Not a penny," Mr. Crockett snapped.

d.i.c.k nodded his head thoughtfully and murmured, "Oh, I see."

"Of course, and quite naturally, it would only be fair, you know, you will have a small allowance for your personal spending," Mr. Davidson said. "Say, a dollar, or, perhaps, two dollars, a week. As you grow older this allowance will be increased. And by the time you are twenty-one, doubtlessly you will be fully qualified--with advice, of course--to handle your own affairs."

"And until I am twenty-one my twenty million wouldn't buy me a hundred dollars to do as I please with?" d.i.c.k queried very subduedly.

Mr. Davidson started to corroborate in soothing phrases, but was waved to silence by d.i.c.k, who continued:

"As I understand it, whatever money I handle will be by agreement between the four of us?"

The Board of Guardians nodded.

"That is, whatever we agree, goes?"

Again the Board of Guardians nodded.

"Well, I'd like to have a hundred right now," d.i.c.k announced.

"What for?" Mr. Crockett demanded.

"I don't mind telling you," was the lad's steady answer. "To go traveling."

"You'll go to bed at eight:thirty this evening," Mr. Crockett retorted.

"And you don't get any hundred. The lady we spoke to you about will be here before six. She is to have, as we explained, daily and hourly charge of you. At six-thirty, as usual, you will dine, and she will dine with you and see you to bed. As we told you, she will have to serve the place of a mother to you--see that your ears are clean, your neck washed--"

"And that I get my Sat.u.r.day night bath," d.i.c.k amplified meekly for him.

"Precisely."

"How much are you--am I--paying the lady for her services?" d.i.c.k questioned in the disconcerting, tangential way that was already habitual to him, as his school companions and teachers had learned to their cost.

Mr. Crockett for the first time cleared his throat for pause.

"I'm paying her, ain't I?" d.i.c.k prodded. "Out of the twenty million, you know."

"The spit of his father," said Mr. Sloc.u.m in an aside.

"Mrs. Summerstone, the lady as you elect to call her, receives one hundred and fifty a month, eighteen hundred a year in round sum," said Mr. Crockett.

"It's a waste of perfectly good money," d.i.c.k sighed. "And board and lodging thrown in!"

He stood up--not the born aristocrat of the generations, but the reared aristocrat of thirteen years in the n.o.b Hill palace. He stood up with such a manner that his Board of Guardians left their leather chairs to stand up with him. But he stood up as no Lord Fauntleroy ever stood up; for he was a mixer. He had knowledge that human life was many-faced and many-placed. Not for nothing had he been spelled down by Mona Sanguinetti. Not for nothing had he fought Tim Hagan to a standstill and, co-equal, ruled the schoolyard roost with him.

He was birthed of the wild gold-adventure of Forty-nine. He was a reared aristocrat and a grammar-school-trained democrat. He knew, in his precocious immature way, the differentiations between caste and ma.s.s; and, behind it all, he was possessed of a will of his own and of a quiet surety of self that was incomprehensible to the three elderly gentlemen who had been given charge of his and his destiny and who had pledged themselves to increase his twenty millions and make a man of him in their own composite image.

"Thank you for your kindness," Young d.i.c.k said generally to the three.

"I guess we'll get along all right. Of course, that twenty millions is mine, and of course you've got to take care of it for me, seeing I know nothing of business--"

"And we'll increase it for you, my boy, we'll increase it for you in safe, conservative ways," Mr. Sloc.u.m a.s.sured him.

"No speculation," Young d.i.c.k warned. "Dad's just been lucky--I've heard him say that times have changed and a fellow can't take the chances everybody used to take."

From which, and from much which has already pa.s.sed, it might erroneously be inferred that Young d.i.c.k was a mean and money-grubbing soul. On the contrary, he was at that instant entertaining secret thoughts and plans so utterly regardless and disdainful of his twenty millions as to place him on a par with a drunken sailor sowing the beach with a three years' pay-day.

"I am only a boy," Young d.i.c.k went on. "But you don't know me very well yet. We'll get better acquainted by and by, and, again thanking you...."

He paused, bowed briefly and grandly as lords in n.o.b Hill palaces early learn to bow, and, by the quality of the pause, signified that the audience was over. Nor did the impact of dismissal miss his guardians.

They, who had been co-lords with his father, withdrew confused and perplexed. Messrs. Davidson and Sloc.u.m were on the point of resolving their perplexity into wrath, as they went down the great stone stairway to the waiting carriage, but Mr. Crockett, the testy and snappish, muttered ecstatically: "The son of a gun! The little son of a gun!"

The carriage carried them down to the old Pacific Union Club, where, for another hour, they gravely discussed the future of Young d.i.c.k Forrest and pledged themselves anew to the faith reposed in them by Lucky Richard Forrest. And down the hill, on foot, where gra.s.s grew on the paved streets too steep for horse-traffic, Young d.i.c.k hurried. As the height of land was left behind, almost immediately the palaces and s.p.a.cious grounds of the nabobs gave way to the mean streets and wooden warrens of the working people. The San Francisco of 1887 as incontinently intermingled its slums and mansions as did the old cities of Europe. n.o.b Hill arose, like any medieval castle, from the mess and ruck of common life that denned and laired at its base.

Young d.i.c.k came to pause alongside a corner grocery, the second story of which was rented to Timothy Hagan Senior, who, by virtue of being a policeman with a wage of a hundred dollars a month, rented this high place to dwell above his fellows who supported families on no more than forty and fifty dollars a month.

In vain Young d.i.c.k whistled up through the unscreened, open windows.

Tim Hagan Junior was not at home. But Young d.i.c.k wasted little wind in the whistling. He was debating on possible adjacent places where Tim Hagan might be, when Tim himself appeared around the corner, bearing a lidless lard-can that foamed with steam beer. He grunted greeting, and Young d.i.c.k grunted with equal roughness, just as if, a brief s.p.a.ce before, he had not, in most lordly fashion, terminated an audience with three of the richest merchant-kings of an imperial city. Nor did his possession of twenty increasing millions hint the slightest betrayal in his voice or mitigate in the slightest the gruffness of his grunt.

"Ain't seen yeh since yer old man died," Tim Hagan commented.

"Well, you're seein' me now, ain't you?" was Young d.i.c.k's retort. "Say, Tim, I come to see you on business."

"Wait till I rush the beer to the old man," said Tim, inspecting the state of the foam in the lard-can with an experienced eye. "He'll roar his head off if it comes in flat."

"Oh, you can shake it up," Young d.i.c.k a.s.sured him. "Only want to see you a minute. I'm hitting the road to-night. Want to come along?"

Tim's small, blue Irish eyes flashed with interest.

"Where to?" he queried.

"Don't know. Want to come? If you do, we can talk it over after we start? You know the ropes. What d'ye say?"

"The old man'll beat the stuffin' outa me," Tim demurred.

"He's done that before, an' you don't seem to be much missing," Young d.i.c.k callously rejoined. "Say the word, an' we'll meet at the Ferry Building at nine to-night. What d'ye say? I'll be there."

"Supposin' I don't show up?" Tim asked.

"I'll be on my way just the same." Young d.i.c.k turned as if to depart, paused casually, and said over his shoulder, "Better come along."

Tim shook up the beer as he answered with equal casualness, "Aw right.

I'll be there."

After parting from Tim Hagan Young d.i.c.k spent a busy hour or so looking up one, Marcovich, a Slavonian schoolmate whose father ran a chop-house in which was reputed to be served the finest twenty-cent meal in the city. Young Marcovich owed Young d.i.c.k two dollars, and Young d.i.c.k accepted the payment of a dollar and forty cents as full quittance of the debt.

Also, with shyness and perturbation, Young d.i.c.k wandered down Montgomery Street and vacillated among the many p.a.w.nshops that graced that thoroughfare. At last, diving desperately into one, he managed to exchange for eight dollars and a ticket his gold watch that he knew was worth fifty at the very least.