With the Procession Part 29

Among the first of the family to have extended speech with him after the _expose_ was his aunt Lydia. He had gone to her house to put the last few finishing touches to Bertie Patterson's portrait. To his aunt and to Bertie herself the portrait seemed already finished, but it is only the artist who knows when the end has really been reached. He asked his aunt for Bertie.

"Well," she hesitated, as she looked at him with a kind of furtive and wondering interest, "Bertie is very busy this afternoon. If there is anything more to be done--and I don't exactly see that there is--it must be done without her, I'm afraid."

"Can't I see her?" he asked, brusquely. "This is the very time I need her. What is she so busy about?"

"She is packing. You know I've kept her a good deal longer already than I expected to--she can't stay into summer. Her mother has written several times, asking for her, and now, finally, she's really got to go." There was a grieving disappointment in Mrs. Rhodes's voice, and a cast of keen but discreet curiosity in her eye.

"When is she going?"

"In the morning. Then her own people will get her well before dark."

"I'm not to see her to say good-bye?--my own cousin, almost."

"Nonsense--not at all. I'll tell her good-bye for you."

"And the picture?"

"Well, _that_ we may consider finished, I think." Her eyes were resting on the wall behind him. He turned and saw the portrait fastened upon it.

"So she is not even to have--" he began.

"Now, Truesdale," interrupted his aunt, "the picture is not Bertie's, but mine. I thought you understood that."

She followed him to the door. "You won't stay a few minutes longer?" she inquired, with an emollient intention. He shook his head.

"I won't say, Truesdale," she proceeded, with her hand on the k.n.o.b, "how disappointed I am. Everything, of course, is at a stand-still now.

Whether things ever go on again will depend upon you yourself. I am sure that any--any expression of regret, any promise of--of--"

"Ouf!" said Truesdale, as he descended the steps, undecided whether to laugh or to curse. "'When I was a student at Cadiz,'" he found himself humming, half-unconsciously. "H'm! one thing learned in the study of this peculiar civilization: general badness jollied up, specific badness frowned down. What other discoveries await me, I wonder?"

Before he had taken a dozen steps a brougham drawn by a pair of blacks in glittering, gold-plated harness drew up suddenly at the curbstone, in obedience to directions given through the half-open door. In a second the door opened wide, and Gladys McKenna beckoned to him. "Get in," she uttered, in a half-repressed cry.

She had divined the situation in two swift glances. She had witnessed the moody exit of Truesdale, and she had had a glimpse of the anxious little face of Bertie Patterson in the bay-window above. Her desire to live life, to dramatize it as promptly and effectively as possible, had led her to the instant appropriation of the banned and rejected Truesdale--thus it was that she figured him.

"Get in," she repeated; "I can take you along six or eight blocks. The coachman knows you by sight, I'm sure. But never mind; nothing matters now. My letter--did you get it?"

"Another!" thought Truesdale. He made the door fast. "No."

"I felt sure you wouldn't," she panted, excitedly. "I gave it to that man to mail." She pointed towards the occupant of the box-seat. "He has played me false."

Truesdale smiled at her phrase. "Well, never mind; you can tell me what there was in it." He stretched out his long legs negligently under the opposite seat, determined to take this new ordeal as lightly as possible.

From his point of view the girl was doing nothing towards gaining a greater measure of approval. "She never had any consideration for me," he was thinking, "until she saw that I cared for the town as little as she did; and she has waited to fling herself at me unreservedly until I have shown myself too awful for anybody else. Why did I let her pick me up? and how soon can I have her set me down?"

"You will learn now who your real friends are," she declared, casting herself energetically into a leading _role_; "not fair-weather friends, but friends through thick and thin. Let me tell you: there is a conspiracy against you." She laid her hand on his arm, and looked at him with a wide stare; she seemed to thrill with the consciousness of an important partic.i.p.ation in a succession of stirring actualities.

"Is there, indeed?" Whatever one's plight, there is little consolation in the ministrations of an unwelcome hand. Considering this, that, and the other, he was now, as at his aunt's door, again midway between a laugh and a curse.

"Yes. That man--that German, or whatever--was at the house last evening, and--oh, why will Albert drive so fast?" she complained, as she made a seeming calculation of the many things she had to say and the little time she had to say them in. "Can't something be done to make him go a little slower?"

"The horses feel lively," answered Truesdale, to whom the present rapid course was perfectly agreeable; "I expect he'll have to let them go their own gait." He glanced out at a pa.s.sing church or two, and frowned slightly; why did this girl insist upon doing his mathematical problems for him? Had not he himself already put his two and two together and made them four?

Gladys went on, telling him what she knew, guessed, surmised, suspected.

"And they--they suspect _me_," she continued, in a mounting tone of tragedy. "And I'm--I'm going home in a few days." There were tears on the dark fringes of her eyes; he thought of a wax image exposed overnight to a heavy dew. "And all for your sake," the moisture seemed to say.

Truesdale began to feel uncomfortable and a shade ungrateful. "I dare say she means well," he thought; "but I--I wish she wouldn't."

The carriage was pa.s.sing between two other churches; he saw that he might alight after another square of it. "One more will be plenty," he muttered, and already his hand stole towards the handle of the door.

"You can't think how they both hate you--my aunt and uncle--and me, too, I'm afraid. They're really driving me out of the house. But never mind; I can endure even more than that for one that--for the right."

"When did you say you were going?" inquired Truesdale. It was only by asking plain, every-day questions that he could oppose this robust romanticism.

"Day after to-morrow--or the next."

"Well," said Truesdale, quietly, "I should think you would do very well at home--much better than here."

"But where am I to see you before I go? Where are we to say good-bye?"

A cable-car clanged along the cross-street immediately ahead of them, and the ten yellow stories of a vast hotel loomed up just beyond. "Right on this corner," replied Truesdale, as the carriage b.u.mped across the tracks. "The interval is short, as you suggest, and there is no time like the present." He put his hand on the door and fixed his eye upon the corner shop; he often bought a cigar there, and meant to buy one now. He also meant this good-bye as literally final.

"You want me to let you out here? Stop, Albert. Well, good-afternoon,"

she said, smilingly waiving the idea of finality; "you shall know to-morrow where you can meet me. You are not deserted by everybody, after all, you see." She gave him her hand, or rather laid hold of his. "But take good care of yourself, all the same."

Truesdale stepped out. "I'll try to," he said, mumblingly; "I always have."

Being thus minded, Truesdale received but grudgingly the tenders of his brother Roger to a.s.sist in the caretaking. He admitted, however, that it would be less embarra.s.sing to confer with one person than a dozen, and that if the whole connection were to be represented by a single spokesman, then Roger was the one that he preferred.

Roger was held by his family to be above all foibles and frailties; his aunt Lydia had once told him, on the day of a niece's hopeless return to the East, that he had too much head and not enough heart. It is certain that he had marked out a definite course for himself, and that nothing, so far, had had the power to divert him materially from it; and he had a far-reaching contempt for the man who permitted the gray matter of his brain to be demoralized by the red matter in his veins. He kept a firm hand on his own affairs and on those of his father that were not immediately connected with the business of his father's firm. His severe face was smooth-shaven, as he thought the face of a lawyer ought to be, and he could address the higher courts with such a loud and brazen utterance as to cause the court-loungers almost to feel the judges shrinking and shrivelling under their robes. His was a hot and vehement nature, but it burned with a flame blue rather than red.

"Well," he said, with a look of extreme distaste fixed half on his brother and half on his book-shelves, "we can accept her and make the best of her. I have seen her and her father. While I can't say I admire the personal character of either, I am not prejudiced by the fact that he is only a clerk and she only a shop-girl. They are beginners here; I am willing to believe that they were something better at home. We can accept her; we shall have to, I suppose."

Truesdale reared his beautiful brazen front and flashed on his brother a haughty and disdainful smile. "You can accept her? Will you please tell me what you mean by that? And 'better at home'!" He burst into open and derisive laughter. "What new Arcadia is this, where even the lawyers walk about with their beribboned crooks and the little baa-lambs following behind them? We have been sitting in conclave, have we, on a mossy bank in some sylvan shade, with chaplets on our brows, and we have piped and twittered over the matter, and have decided that we can 'accept her'?

Well, you can do more than I can," he added, abruptly. His foot slipped from the rung of the opposite chair and fell to the bare floor with a contemptuous clump.

"You've got your own character to clear, haven't you?" asked Roger, with a severe brevity.

Truesdale replaced his foot on the rung of the other chair and slid down into his own as he thrust his hands deeper into his pockets. "Dear me,"

he said, in affected apprehension, "am I in any danger? Well, well; if such a thing can hurt a young man, I shall be glad to know it--I never knew it before. Now, _la-bas_, for example--"

He drew out one of his hands and waved it vaguely; he seemed to be conjuring up a wider and more liberal world--the only one he had learned.

"It can," insisted his brother; "it will. Both you and your family."

Truesdale's thought flashed back to Bertie Patterson and the unfinished picture. It came to him all at once that his brother might be better worth listening to than he had been disposed to concede.

"And your family," Roger repeated.

But Truesdale's thought, lingering over the picture, made little of this second point. He did scant justice to the mortification of his mother before her church-members and her few remaining neighbors, or that of his sisters within the circle which they had lately constructed for themselves. Nor did he yet realize, even with Bertie's picture in mind, the hundred checks and bars that awaited him in a society of whose primitive purity he had made a jest whenever occasion came.

"Dear Roger," he presently rejoined, in his most genial and winning voice, "you mean well, I am sure--well by me and by the family and by everybody. And I dare say you do very nicely in your own narrow field; but as for knowing life--well, really now, do you think you understand what it is to live?"