Read Ebook: The Lawton Girl by Frederic Harold

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Ebook has 1851 lines and 115216 words, and 38 pages

Second Floor.

"Oh, he is here, then; he has come back!" she said aloud. She repeated, with an air of enjoying the sound of the words: "He has come back."

But even as she spoke the sad look spread over her face again. She walked back to the place where she had been standing, and looked resolutely away from the sign--at the tipped-over load of hay, at the engine-house, at the sleighs passing to and fro--through eyes dimmed afresh with tears.

Thus she still stood when her father returned. The expressman who halted his bob-sleigh at the cutting in front of her, and who sat holding the reins while her father piled her valise and parcels on behind, looked her over with a half-awed, half-quizzical glance, and seemed a long time making up his mind to speak. Finally he said:

"How d'do? Want to ride here, on the seat, longside of me?"

There was an indefinable something in his tone, and in the grin that went with it, which she resented quickly.

"I had no idea of riding at all," she made answer.

Her father, who had seated himself on a trunk in the centre of the sleigh, interposed. "Why, Jess, you remember Steve, don't you?" he asked, apologetically.

The expressman and the girl looked briefly at one another, and nodded in a perfunctory manner.

Lawton went on: "He offered himself to give us a lift as far as the house. He's goin' that way--ain't you, Steve?"

The impulse was strong in Jessica to resist--precisely why she might have found it difficult to explain--but apparently there was no choice remaining to her. "Very well, then," she said, "I will sit beside you, father."

She stepped into the sleigh at this, and took her seat on the other end of the big trunk. The express-man gave a slap of the lines and a cluck to the horse, which started briskly down the wide street, the bell at its collar giving forth a sustained, cheery tinkle as they sped through the snow.

"Well, what do you think--ain't this better'n walkin'?" remarked Lawton, after a time, knocking his heels in a satisfied way against the side of the trunk.

"I felt as if the walk would do me good," she answered, simply. Her face was impassivity itself, as she looked straight before her, over the express-man's shoulder.

Ben Lawton felt oppressed by the conviction that his daughter was annoyed. Perhaps it was because he had insisted on riding--instead of saying that he would walk too, when she had disclosed her preference. He ventured upon an explanation, stealing wistful glances at her meantime:

"You see, Jess, Dave Rantell's got a turkey-shoot on to-day, down at his place, and I kind o' thought I'd try my luck with this here half-dollar,'fore it gets dark. The days are shortenin' so, this season o' year, that I couldn't get there without Steve give me a lift. And if I should get a turkey--why, we'll have a regular Thanksgiving dinner; and with you come home, too!"

To this she did not trust herself to make answer, but kept her face rigidly set, and her eyes fixed as if engrossed in meditation. They had passed the great iron-works on the western outskirts of the village now, and the road leading to the suburb of Burfield ran for a little through almost open country. The keener wind raised here in resistance to the rapid transit of the sleigh--no doubt it was this which brought the deep flush to her cheeks and the glistening moisture to her eyes.

They presently overtook two young men who were trudging along abreast, each in one of the tracks made by traffic, and who stepped aside to let the sleigh go by.

"Hello, Hod!" called out the expressman as he passed. "I've got your trunks. Come back for good?"

"Hello, Steve!... I don't quite know yet," was the reply which came back--the latter half of it too late for the expressman's ears.

Jessica had not seen the pedestrians until the sleigh was close upon them; then, in the moment's glimpse of them vouchsafed her, she had recognized young Mr. Boyce, and, in looking away from him with swift decision, had gazed full into the eyes of his companion. This other remembered her too, it was evident, even in that brief instant of passing, for a smile of greeting was in the glance he returned, and he lifted his hat as she swept by.

She turned to her father, and lifting her voice above the jingle of the bell, spoke with animation:

"Tell me about the second man we just, passed--Mr. Tracy. Has he been in Thessaly long, and is he doing a good business?" She added hastily, as if to forestall some possible misconception: "He used to be my school-teacher, you know."

"Guess he's gettin' on all right," replied Lawton: "I hain't heard nothin' to the contrary. He must a' been back from New York along about a year--maybe two." To her great annoyance he shouted out to the driver: "Steve, how long's Rube Tracy been back in Thessaly? You keep track o' things better'n I do."

The expressman replied over his shoulder: "Should say about a year come Christmas." Then, after a moment's pause, he transferred the reins to his other hand, twisted himself half around on his seat, and looked into Jessica's face with his earlier and offensive expression of mingled familiarity and diffidence. "He appeared to remember you: took off his hat," he said. There was an unmistakable leer on his lank countenance as he added:

"That other fellow was Hod Boyce, the General's son, you know--just come back from the old country."

"Yes, I know!" she made answer curtly, and turned away from him.

During what remained of the journey she preserved silence, keeping her gaze steadily fixed on the drifted fields beyond the fence in front of her and thinking about these two young men--at first with infinite bitterness and loathing of the one, and then, for a longer time, and with a soft, half-saddened pleasure, of the other.

It was passing strange that she should find herself here at all--here in this village which for years at a time she had sworn never to see again. But, when she thought of it, it seemed still more remarkable that at the very outset she should see, walking together, the two men whom memory most distinctly associated with her old life here as a girl. She had supposed them both--her good and her evil genius--to be far away; in all her inchoate specula-tions about how she should meet various people, no idea of encountering either of these had risen in her mind. Yet here they were--and walking together!

Their conjunction disturbed and vaguely troubled her. She tried over and over again to reassure herself by saying that it was a mere accident; of course they had been acquainted with each other for years, and they had happened to meet, and what more natural than that they should walk on side by side? And yet it somehow seemed wrong.

Reuben Tracy was the best man she had ever known. Poor girl--so grievous had been her share of life's lessons that she really thought of him as the only good man she had ever known. In all the years of her girlhood--unhappy, wearied, and mutinous, with squalid misery at home, and no respite from it possible outside which, looked back upon at this distance, did not seem equally coarse and repellent--there had been but this solitary gleam of light, the friendship of Reuben Tracy. Striving now to recall the forms in which this friendship had been manifested, she was conscious that there was not much to remember. He had simply impressed her as a wise and unselfish friend--that was all. The example of kindness, gentleness, of patient industry which he had set before her in the rude, bare-walled little school-room, and which she felt now had made a deep and lasting impression on her, had been set for all the rest as well. If sometimes he had seemed to like her better than the other girls, his preference was of a silent, delicate, unexpressed sort--as if prompted solely by acquaintance with her greater need for sympathy. Without proffers of aid, almost without words, he had made her comprehend that, if evil fell upon her, the truest and most loyal help and counsel in all the world could be had from him for the asking.

The evil had fallen, in one massed, cruel, stunning stroke, and she had staggered blindly away--away anywhere, anyhow, to any fate. Almost her instincts had persuaded her to go to him; but he was a young man, only a few years her senior--and she had gone away without seeing him. But she had carried into the melancholy, bitter exile a strange sense of gratitude, if so it may be called, to Reuben Tracy for the compassionate aid he would have extended, had he known; and she said to herself now, in her heart of hearts, that it was this good feeling which had remained like a leaven of hope in her nature, and had made it possible for her at last, by its mysterious and beneficent workings, to come out into the open air again and turn her face toward the sunlight.

And he had taken off his hat to her!

The very thought newly nerved her for the ordeal which she had proposed to herself--the task of bearing, here in the daily presence of those among whom she had been reared, the burden of a hopelessly discredited life.

The changes in Thessaly's external appearance did not particularly impress young Mr. Horace Boyce as he walked down the main street in the direction of his father's house. For one thing, he had been here for a fortnight only a few months before, upon his return from Europe, and had had pointed out to him all of novelty that his native village offered. And again, nearly four years of acquaintance with the chief capitals of the Old World had so dulled his vision, so to speak, that it was no longer alert to detect the presence of new engine-houses and brick stores in the place of earlier and less imposing structures. To be accurate, he did not think much about Thessaly, one way or the other. So long as his walk led him along the busier part of the thoroughfare, his attention was fully occupied by encounters and the exchange of greetings with old school-fellows and neighbors, who all seemed glad to see him home again; and when he had passed the last store on the street, and had of necessity exchanged the sidewalk for one of the two deep-beaten tracks in the centre of the drifted road, his thoughts were still upon a more engrossing subject than the growth and prosperity of any North American town.

They were pleasant thoughts, though, as any one might read in a glance at his smooth-shaven, handsome face, with its satisfied half smile and its bold, confident expression of eyes. He stopped once in his rapid walk and stood for a minute or two in silent contemplation, just before he reached the open stretch of country which lay like a wedge between the two halves of the village. The white surface in front of him was strewn here with dry boughs and twigs, broken from the elms above by the weight of the recent snowfall. Beyond the fence some boys with comforters tied about their ears were skating on a pond in the fields. Mr. Boyce looked over these to the darkened middle-distance of the wintry picture, where rose the grimy bulk and tall smoke-belching chimneys of the Minster iron-works. He seemed to find exhilaration in his long, intent gaze at these solid evidences of activity and wealth, for he filled his lungs with a deep, contented draught of the nipping air when he finally turned and resumed his walk, swinging his shoulders and lightly tapping the crusted snowbanks at his side with his stick as he stepped briskly forward.

The Minster iron-works were undoubtedly worth thinking about, and all the more so because they were not new. During all the dozen or more years of their existence they had never once been out of blast. At seasons of extreme depression in the market, when even Pennsylvania was idle and the poor smelters of St. Louis and Chicago could scarcely remember when they had been last employed, these chimneys upon which he had just looked had never ceased for a day to hurl their black clouds into the face of the sky. They had been built by one of the cleverest and most daring of all the strong men whom that section had produced--the late Stephen Minster. It was he who had seen in the hills close about the choicest combination of ores to be found in the whole North; it was he who had brought in the capital to erect and operate the works, who had organized and controlled the enterprise by which a direct road to the coal-fields was opened, and who, in affording employment to thousands and good investments to scores, had not failed to himself amass a colossal fortune. He had been dead now nearly three years, but the amount of his wealth, left in its entirety to his family, was still a matter of conjecture. Popular speculation upon this point had but a solitary clew with which to work. In a contest which arose a year before his death, over the control of the Northern Union Telegraph Company, he had sent down proxies representing a clear six hundred thousand dollars' worth of shares. With this as a basis for calculation, curious people had arrived at a shrewd estimate of his total fortune as ranging somewhere between two and three millions of dollars.

Most of these facts were familiar as well to Mr. Horace Boyce. As he strode along, filliping the snow with his cane and humming to himself, he mentally embellished them with certain deductions drawn from information gathered during the journey by rail from New York. The Miss Kate Minster whom he had met was the central figure in his meditations, as indeed she was the important personage in her family. The mother had impressed him as an amiable and somewhat limited woman, without much force of character; the younger daughter, Ethel, he remembered dimly, as a delicate and under-sized girl who was generally kept home from school by reason of ill-health, and it was evident from such remarks as the two ladies dropped that she was still something of an invalid. But it was clear that Miss Kate lacked neither moral nor bodily strength.

He was quite frank with himself in thinking that, apart from all questions of money, she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. It was an added charm that her beauty fitted so perfectly the idea of great wealth. She might have been the daughter of the millions themselves, so tall and self-contained and regal a creature was she, with the firm, dark face of her father reproduced in feminine grace and delicacy of outline; with a skin as of an Oriental queen, softly luxuriant in texture and in its melting of creamy and damask and deepening olive hues; and with large, richly brown, deep-fringed eyes which looked proudly and steadily on all the world, young men included. These fine orbs were her most obvious physical inheritance from her father. The expression "the Minster eyes," would convey as distinct an impression to the brain of the average Thessalian as if one had said "the Minster iron-works." The great founder of the millions, Stephen Minster, had had them, and they were the notable feature of even his impressive face. The son who was dead, Stephen junior, had also had them, as Horace now recalled to mind; but set in his weak head they had seemed to lose significance, and had been, in truth, very generally in his latter years dimmed and opacated by the effects of dissipation. The pale, sweet-faced little Ethel Minster, as he remembered her, had them as well, although with her they were almost hazel in color, and produced a timid, mournful effect. But to no other face in the entire family gallery did they seem to so wholly belong of right as to the countenance of Miss Kate.

Young Mr. Boyce's thoughts wandered easily from the image of the heiress to the less tangible question of her disposition, and, more particularly, of her attitude toward him. There were obscurities here over which a less sanguine young man might have bitten his lips. He had ventured upon recalling himself to mother and daughter very soon after the train left New York, and they had not shown any shadow of annoyance when he took a vacant chair opposite them and began a conversation which lasted, such as it was, through all the long journey. But now that he came to think of it, his share in that conversation had been not only the proverbial lion's, but more nearly that of a whole zoological garden. Mrs. Minster had not affected any especial reserve; it was probable that she was by nature a listener rather than a talker, for she had asked him numerous questions about himself and about Europe. As for Miss Minster, he could scarcely recall anything she had said, what time she was looking at him instead of at her book. And he had not always been strictly comfortable under this look. There had been nothing unfriendly in it, it was true, nor could it occur to anybody to suspect in it a lack of comprehension or of interest. In fact, he said to himself, it was eloquent with both. The trouble was, as he uneasily attempted to define it, that she seemed to comprehend too much. Still, after all, he had said nothing to which she could take the faintest exception, and, if she was the intelligent woman he took her to be, there must have been a good deal in his talk to entertain her.

Even a less felicitous phrase-maker than Horace Boyce could have manufactured pleasant small-talk out of such experiences as his had been. The only son of a well-to-do and important man in Thessaly, he had had the further advantage of inheriting some twenty thousand dollars upon attaining his majority, and after finishing his course at college had betaken himself to Europe to pursue more recondite studies there, both in and out of his chosen profession of the law. The fact that he had devoted most of his attention to the gleaning of knowledge lying beyond the technical pale of the law did not detract from the interesting quality of his observations. Besides listening to lectures at Heidelberg, he had listened to the orchestra swaying in unison under the baton of Strauss at Vienna, and to a good many other things in Pesth and Paris and Brussels and London, a large number of which could with propriety be described in polite conversation. And he flattered himself that he had discoursed upon these things rather cleverly, skirting delicate points with neatness, and bringing in effective little descriptions and humorous characterizations in quite a natural way.

Moreover, he said to himself, it had been his privilege to see America in perspective--to stand upon a distant eminence, as it were, and look the whole country over, by and large, at a glance. This had enabled him on his return to discover the whimsical aspect of a good many things which the stay-at-home natives took with all seriousness. He had indicated some of these to the two ladies with a light and amiably bantering touch, and with a consciousness that he was opening up novel ground to both his hearers.

Still--he wondered if Miss Minster had really liked it. Could it be possible that she belonged to that thin-skinned class of Americans who cannot brook any comment upon anything in or of their country that is not wholly eulogistic--who resent even the most harmless and obvious pleasantry pointed at a cis-Atlantic institution? He decided this promptly in the negative. He had met such people, but he could not associate them in his mind with the idea of great wealth. And Miss Minster was rich--incredibly rich. No doubt she was thinking, even while she listened to him, of the time when she too should go to Europe, and dazzle its golden youth with her beauty and her millions. Now that he thought of it, he had seen much that same look before on the face of an American heiress, on her return from a London "five-o'clock tea," at which she had met an eligible marquis.

Could it be that her thoughts ran, instead, upon an eligible somebody nearer home? He devoted himself at this to canvassing the chances of her fancy being already fixed. It was of little importance that nothing in their conversation suggested this, because it was a subject to which they naturally would not have alluded. Yet he recalled that Mrs. Minster had spoken of their great seclusion more than once. He had gathered, moreover, that they knew very few people in New York City, and that they had little acquaintance with the section of its population which is colloquially known as "society." This looked mightily like a clear field.

Young Mr. Boyce stopped to thrust his cane under a twisted branch which lay on the snow, and toss it high over the fence, when he reached this stage of his meditations. His squared, erect shoulders took on a more buoyant swing than ever as he resumed his walk. A clear field, indeed!

And now as to the problem of proceeding to occupy that field. Where was there a gap in the wall? Millions were not to be approached and gained by simple and primitive methods, as one knocks apples off an overhanging bough with a fence-rail. Strategy and finesse of the first order were required. Without doubt there was an elaborate system of defences reared around this girl of girls. Mrs. Minster's reference to seclusion might have itself been a warning that they lived inside a fort, and were as ready to train a gun on him as on anybody else. Battlements of this sort had been stormed time and time again, no doubt; human history was full of such instances. But Mr. Boyce's tastes were not for violent or desperate adventures. To go over a parapet with one's sword in one's teeth, in deadly peril and tempestuous triumph, might suit his father the General: for his own part, it seemed more sagacious and indubitably safer to tunnel under the works, and emerge on the inside at the proper psychological moment to be welcomed as a friend and adviser.

Adviser! Who was their lawyer? The young man cast up in his mind the list of Thessaly's legal practitioners, as far as he could remember them. It seemed most probable that Benoni Clarke, the ex-district-attorney, would have the Minster business, if for no other reason than that he needed it less than the rest did. But Mr. Clarke was getting old, and was in feeble health as well. Perhaps he would be glad to have a young, active, and able partner, who had had the advantage of European study. Or it might be--who could tell?--that the young man with the European education could go in on his own account, and by sheer weight of cleverness, energy, and superior social address win over the Minster business. What unlimited opportunities such a post would afford him! Not only would he be the only young man in Thessaly who had been outside of his own country, the best talker, the best-informed man, the best-mannered man of the place--but he would be able to exhibit all these excellences from the favored vantage-ground of an intimate, confidential relation. The very thought was intoxicating.

Mr. Horace Boyce was so pre-occupied with these pleasing meditations that he overtook a man walking in the other track, and had nearly passed him, before something familiar in the figure arrested his attention. He turned, and recognized an old schoolmate whom he had not seen for years, and had not expected to find in Thessaly.

"Why--Reuben Tracy, as I live!" he exclaimed, cordially. "So you're back again, eh? On a visit to your folks?"

The other shook hands with him. "No," he made answer. "I've had an office here for nearly a year. You are looking well. I'm glad to see you again. Have you come back for good?"

"Yes. That's all settled," replied Mr. Horace, without a moment's hesitation.

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