The Romance of a Plain Man Part 18

"Here're the books," said George, leading me to the door of a long room, filled with rosewood bookcases and family portraits of departed Bolingbrokes. Then as I was about to cross the threshold, the sound of a bright voice speaking to the General on the porch caused me to stop short, and stand holding my breath in the hall.

"Good afternoon, General! You look as if you needed exercise."

"Exercise, indeed! Do you take me for your age, you minx?"

"Oh, come, General! You aren't old--you're lazy."

By this time George and I had edged nearer the porch, and even before he breathed her name in a whisper, I knew in the instant that her sparkling glance ran over me, that she was my little girl of the red shoes just budding into womanhood. She was standing in a square patch of sunlight, midway between the steps and a bed of red geraniums near the gate, and her dress of some thin white material was blown closely against the curves of her bosom and her rounded hips. Over her broad white forehead, with its heavily arched black eyebrows, the ma.s.s of her pale brown hair spread in the strong breeze and stood out like the wings of a bird in flight, and this gave her whole, finely poised figure a swift and expectant look, as of one who is swept forward by some radiant impulse.

Her face, too, had this same ardent expression; I saw it in her eyes, which fixed me the next moment with her starry and friendly gaze; in her very full red lips that broke the pure outline of her features; and in her strong, square chin held always a little upward with a proud and impatient carriage. So vivid was my first glimpse of her, that for a single instant I wondered if the radiance in her figure was not produced by some fleeting accident of light and shadow. When I knew her better I learned that this quality of brightness belonged neither to the mind nor to an edge of light, but to the face itself--to some peculiar mingling of clear grey with intense darkness in her brow and eyes.

As she stood there chatting gayly with the General, young George eyed her from the darkened hall with a glance in which I read, when I turned to him, a touch of his uncle's playful masculine superiority.

"She'll be a stunner, if she doesn't get too big," he observed. "I don't like big girls--do you?"

Then as I made no rejoinder, he added after a moment, "Do you think her mouth spoils her? Aunt Hatty calls her mouth coa.r.s.e."

"Coa.r.s.e?" I echoed angrily. "What does she mean by coa.r.s.e?"

"Oh, too red and too full. She says a lady's mouth ought to be a delicate bow."

"I never saw a delicate bow--"

"No more did I--but I'd call Sally a regular stunner now, mouth and all.

Sally!" he broke out suddenly, and stepped out on the porch. "I'll go riding with you some day," he said, "if you want me."

She laughed up at him. "But I don't want you."

"You wanted me bad enough a year ago."

"That was a year ago."

Running hurriedly down the steps, he stood talking to her beside the bed of scarlet geraniums, while I felt a burning embarra.s.sment pervade my body to the very palms of my hands.

"Where's the other fellow, George?" called the General, suddenly.

"What's become of him?"

As he turned his head in my direction, I left the hall, and came out upon the porch, acutely conscious, all the time, that there was too much of me, that my hands and feet got in my way, that I ought to have put on a different shirt in the afternoon.

Sally was stooping over to snip off the head of a geranium, and when she looked up the next instant, with her hair blown back from her forehead, her starry, expectant gaze rested full on my own.

"Why, it's the boy I used to know," she exclaimed, moving toward me.

"Boy, how do you do?" She put out her hand, and as I took it in mine, I saw for the first time that she was a large girl for her age, and would be a large woman. Her figure was already ripening under her thin white gown, but her hands and feet were still those of a child, and moulded, I saw, with that peculiar delicacy, which, I had learned from the doctor, was the distinguishing characteristic of the Virginian aristocracy.

"It is a long time since--since I saw you," she remarked in a cordial voice.

"It's been eight years," I answered. "I wonder that you remember me."

"Oh, I never forget. And besides, if I didn't see you for eight years more, I should still recognise you by your eyes. There aren't many boys," she said merrily, "who have eyes like a blue-eyed collie's."

With this she turned from me to George, and after a word or two to the General, and a nod in my direction, they pa.s.sed through the gate, and went slowly along the street, her pale brown hair still blown like a bird's wing behind her.

The General's sister, young George's Aunt Hatty, a severe little lady, with a very flat figure, had come out on the porch, and was offering her brother a dose of medicine.

"A good girl, Hatty," remarked the great man, in an affable mood. "A little too much of her Aunt Matoaca's spirit for a wife, but a very good girl, as long as you ain't married to her."

"She would be handsome, George, except for her mouth. It's a pity her mouth spoils her."

"What's the matter with her mouth? I haven't got your eyesight, Hatty, but it appears a perfectly good mouth to me."

"That's because you have naturally coa.r.s.e tastes, George. A lady's mouth should be a delicate bow."

A delicate bow, indeed! Those full, sensitive lips that showed like a splash of carmine in the clear pallor of her face! As I walked home under the broad, green leaves of the sycamores, I remembered the features of the pretty maiden at the Old Market, and they appeared to me suddenly divested of all beauty. It was as if a bright beam of sunshine had fallen on a blaze of artificial light, and extinguished it forever.

Henceforth I should move straight toward a single love, as I had already begun to move straight toward a single ambition.

CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH I ENTER SOCIETY AND GET A FALL

My first successful speculation was made in my twenty-first year with five hundred dollars paid to me by Bob Brackett when the Nectar blend had been six months on the market. By the General's advice I put the money in the Old South Chemical Company, and selling out a little later at high profits, I immediately reinvested. As the years went by, that smoking mixture, discovered almost by accident in an idle moment, began to yield me considerably larger checks twice a year; and twice a year, with the General's enthusiastic a.s.sistance, I went in for a modest speculation from which I hoped sometime to reap a fortune. When I was twenty-five, a temporary depression in the market gave me the opportunity which, as Dr. Theophilus had informed me almost daily for ten years, "waits always around the corner for the man who walks quickly." I put everything I owned into copper mining stock, then selling very low, and a year later when the copper trade recovered quickly and grew active, I rushed to the General and enquired breathlessly if I must sell out.

"Hold on and await developments," he replied from his wicker chair over his bandaged foot, "and remember that the successful speculator is the man who always runs in the other direction from the crowd. When you see people sitting still, you'd better get up, and when you see them begin to get up, you'd better sit still. Fortune's a woman, you know; don't try to flirt with her, but at the same time don't throw your boots at her head."

Five years before I had left the tobacco factory to go into the General's office, and my days were spent now, absorbed and alert, beside the chair in which he sat, coolly playing his big game of chess, and controlling a railroad. He was in his day the strongest financier in the South, and he taught me my lesson. Tireless, sleepless, throbbing with a fever that was like the fever of love, I studied at his side every movement of the market, I weighed every word he uttered, I watched every stroke of his stout cork-handled pen. An infallible judge of men, my intimate knowledge soon taught me that it was by judging men, not things, he had won his success. "Learn men, learn men, learn men," he would repeat in one of his frequent losses of temper. "Everything rests on a man, and the way to know the thing is to know the man."

"That's why I'm learning you, General," I once replied, as he hobbled out of his office on my arm.

"Oh, I know, I know," he retorted with his sly chuckle. "You are letting me lean on you now because you think the time will come when you can throw me aside and stand up by yourself. It's age and youth, my boy, age and youth."

He sighed wearily, and looking at him I saw for the first time that he was growing old.

"Well, you've stood straight enough in your day, sir," I answered.

"Oh, I've had my youth, and I shan't begin to put on a long face because I've lost it. I didn't have your stature, Ben, but I had a pretty fair middling-size one of my own. They used to say of me that I had an eye for the big chance, and that's a thing a man's got to be born with. To see big you've got to be big, and that's what I like about you--you ain't busy looking for specks."

"If I can only become as big a man as you, General, I shall be content."

"No, you won't, no, you won't, don't stop at me. Already they are beginning to call you my 'wonderful boy,' you know. 'I like that wonderful boy of yours, George,' Jessoms said to me only last night at the club. You know Jessoms--don't you? He's president of the Union Bank."

"Yes, I talked to him for two solid hours yesterday."

"He told me so, and I said to him: 'By Jove, you're right, Jessoms, and that boy's got a future ahead of him if he doesn't swell.' Now that's the Gospel truth, Ben, and all the body you've got ain't going to save you if you don't keep your head. If you ever feel it beginning to swell, you step outside and put it under a pump, that's the best thing I know of. How old are you?"

"Twenty-six."

"And you've got fifty thousand dollars already?"