The Romance of a Plain Man Part 45

"Yes, dear."

"You never drank but one of Aunt Mehitable's."

"I'm aware of it, and I'm aware of something else. It's worth being poor, Sally, to be poor with you."

"Then give me another taste of your coffee. But you don't call this being poor, do you, you silly boy?--with all this beautiful mahogany that I can use for a mirror? This isn't any fun in the world. Just wait until I spread the cloth over a pine table. Then we'll have something to laugh at sure enough, Ben."

"And I thought you'd cry!"

"You thought a great many very foolish things, my dear. You even thought I'd married you because I wanted to be rich, and it seemed an easy way."

"Only it turned out to be an easier way of getting poor."

"Well, rich or poor, what I married you for, after all, was the essential thing."

"And you've got it, sweetheart?"

"Of course I've got it. If I didn't have it, do you think I'd be able to laugh at a pine table?"

"If I were only sure you realised it!"

"You'll be sure enough when we are in the midst of it, and we'll be in the midst of it, I don't doubt, in a little while. I've been thinking pretty hard since last night, and this is what I worked out while I was making yeast."

"Let's have it, then."

"Now, the first thing we've got to do is to get out of debt, isn't it?"

"The very first thing, if it can be managed."

"We'll manage it this way. The furniture and the silver and my jewels must all be sold, of course; that's easy. But even after we've done that, there'll still be a great big burden to carry, I suppose?"

"Pretty big, I'm afraid, for your shoulders."

"Oh, we'll pay it every bit in the end. We won't go bankrupt. You'll go back to the railroad on a salary, and we'll begin to pinch on the spot."

"Yes, but times are hard and salaries are low."

"Anyway they're salaries, there's that much to be said for them. And while we're pinching as hard as we can pinch, we'll move over to Church Hill and rent two or three rooms in the old house with the enchanted garden. All the servants will have to go except Aunt Euphronasia, who couldn't go very far, poor thing, because she's rheumatic and can't stand on her feet. She can sit still very well, however, and rock the baby, and I'll look after the rooms and get the meals--I'm glad they'll be simple ones--and we'll put by every penny that we can save."

"The mere interest on the debt will take almost as much as we can save.

There'll be some arrangement made, of course, and the payments will be easy, but there's one thing I'm determined on, and that is that I'll pay it, every cent, if I live. Then, too, there's chance, you know.

Something may turn up--something almost always turns up to a man like myself."

"Well, if it turns up, we'll welcome it with open arms. But in the meantime we'll see if we can't sc.r.a.pe along without it. I'm going over this morning to look for rooms. How soon, Ben, do you suppose they will evict us?"

"Does there exist a woman," I demanded sternly, "who can be humorous over her own eviction?"

"It's better to be humorous over one's own than over one's neighbour's, isn't it? And besides, a laugh may help things, but tears never do. I was born laughing, mamma always said."

"Then laugh on, sweetheart."

I had risen from the table, and was moving toward the door, when she caught my arm.

"There's only one thing I'll never, never consent to," she said, "you remember Dolly?"

"Your old mare?"

"I've pensioned her, you know, and I'll pay that pension as long as she lives if we both have to starve."

"You shall do it if we're hanged and drawn for it--and now, Sally, I must be off to my troubles!"

"Then, good-by and be brave. Oh, Ben, my dearest, what is the matter?"

"It's my head. I've been worrying too much, and it's gone back on me like that twice in the last few days."

I went out hurriedly, convinced that even failure wasn't quite so bad as it had appeared from a distance; and Sally, following me to the door, stood smiling after me as I went down the block toward the car line.

Looking back at the corner, I saw that she was still standing on the threshold, with the sun in her eyes and her head held high under the ruffle of lace and ribbon that framed her hair.

The street was filled with people that morning, and at the end of the first block Bonny Page nodded to me jauntily, as she pa.s.sed on her early ride with Ned Marshall. Turning, almost unconsciously, my eyes followed her graceful, very erect figure, in its close black habit, swaying so perfectly with the motion of her chestnut mare. An immeasurable, wind-blown s.p.a.ce seemed to stretch between us, and the very sound of the horse's hoofs on the cobblestones in the street came to me, faint and thin, as if it had floated back from some remote past which I but dimly remembered. I had never felt, even when standing at Bonny's side, that I was within speaking distance of her, and to-day, while I looked after the vanishing horses, I knew that odd, baffling sensation of struggling to break through an inflexible, yet invisible barrier. Why was it that I who had won Sally should still remain so hopelessly divided from all that to which Sally by right and by nature belonged?

Farther down the two great sycamores, still gaunt and bare as skeletons, stood out against a sky of intense blueness; and on the crooked pavement beneath, the shadows, fine and delicate as lace-work, rippled gently in the wind that blew straight in from the river. Looking up from under the silvery boughs, I saw the wire cage of the canary between the parted curtains, and beyond it the pale oval face of Miss Mitty, with its grave, set smile, so like the smile of the painted Blands and Fairfaxes that hung, in ma.s.sive frames, on the drawing-room walls. In the midst of my own ruin an impulse of compa.s.sion entered my heart. The vacancy of the old grey house was like the vacancy of a tomb in which the ashes have scattered, and the one living spirit seemed that of the canary singing joyously in his wire cage. Something in the song brought Sally to my mind as she had appeared that morning at breakfast, and I felt again the soft, comforting touch of the hand she had laid on my face.

Then I turned my eyes to the street, and saw George Bolingbroke coming slowly toward me, beyond the last great sycamore, which grew midway of the bricks. At the sight of him all that had comforted or supported me crumbled and fell. In its place came that sharp physical soreness--like the soreness from violent action--that the shock of my failure had brought. I, who had meant so pa.s.sionately to win in the race, was suddenly crippled. Money, I had said, was all that I had to give, and yet I was beggared now even of that. Shorn of my power, what remained to me that would make me his match?

He came up, taking his cigar from his mouth as he stopped, and flicking the ashes away, while he stood looking at me with an expression of sympathy which he struggled in vain, I saw, to dissemble. On his finely coloured, though rather impa.s.sive features, there was the same darkening of a carefully suppressed emotion--the same lines of anger drawn, not by temper, but by suffering--that I had seen first at the club when his favourite hunter had died, and next on the day when the General had spoken to him, in my presence, of my engagement to Sally. Under his short dark mustache, his thin, nervous lips were set closely together.

"I'm awfully cut up, Ben," he said, "I declare I don't know when I was ever so cut up about anything before."

"I'm cut up too, George, like the deuce, but it doesn't appear to help matters, somehow."

"That's the worst thing about being a man of affairs like you--or like Uncle George," he observed, making an amiable effort to a.s.sure me that even in the hour of adversity, I still held my coveted place in the General's cla.s.s; "when the crash comes, you big ones have to pay the piper, while the rest of us small fry manage to go scot-free."

It was put laboriously, but beneath the words I felt the force of that painful sympathy, too strong for concealment, and yet not strong enough to break through the inherited habit of self-command. The General had broken through, I acknowledged, but then was not the very greatness of the great man the expression of an erratic departure from traditions rather than of the perfect adherence to the racial type?

"And the louder the music the bigger the cost of the piper," I observed, with a laugh.

"Oh, you'll come out all right," he rejoined cheerfully, "things are never so bad as they might be."

"Well, I don't know that there's much comfort in reflecting that a thunder-storm might have been accompanied by an earthquake."

For a moment he stood in silence watching the end of his cigar, which went out in his hand. Then without meeting my eyes he asked in a voice that had a curiously m.u.f.fled sound:--

"It's rough on Sally, isn't it? How does she stand it?"

"As she stands everything--like an angel out of heaven."

"Yes, you're right--she is an angel," he returned, still without looking into my face. An instant later, as if in response to an impulse which for once rose superior to the dead weight of custom, he blurted out with a kind of suffering violence, "I say, Ben, you know it's really awful.

I'm so cut up about it I don't know what to do. I wish you'd let me help you out of this hole till you're on your feet. I've got n.o.body on me, you see, and I can't spend half of my income."

For the first time in our long acquaintance the tables were turned; it was George who was awkward now, and I who was perfectly at my ease.