Short Stories for English Courses

V >> Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.) >> Short Stories for English Courses

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He understood well enough what had happened at Weymore: his
hostess had forgotten that he was coming. Young as Faxon was, this
sad lucidity of soul had been acquired as the result of long
experience, and he knew that the visitors who can least afford to
hire a carriage are almost always those whom their hosts forget to
send for. Yet to say Mrs. Culme had forgotten him was perhaps too
crude a way of putting it. Similar incidents led him to think that
she had probably told her maid to tell the butler to telephone the
coachman to tell one of the grooms (if no one else needed him) to
drive over to Northridge to fetch the new secretary; but on a
night like this what groom who respected his rights would fail to
forget the order?

Faxon's obvious course was to struggle through the drifts to the
village, and there rout out a sleigh to convey him to Weymore; but
what if, on his arrival at Mrs. Culme's, no one remembered to ask
him what this devotion to duty had cost? That, again, was one of
the contingencies he had expensively learned to look out for, and
the perspicacity so acquired told him it would be cheaper to spend
the night at the Northridge inn, and advise Mrs. Culme of his
presence there by telephone. He had reached this decision, and was
about to entrust his luggage to a vague man with a lantern who
seemed to have some loose connection with the railway company,
when his hopes were raised by the sound of sleigh bells.

Two vehicles were just dashing up to the station, and from the
foremost there sprang a young man swathed in furs.

"Weymore?--No, these are not the Weymore sleighs."

The voice was that of the youth who had jumped to the platform--a
voice so agreeable that, in spite of the words, it fell
reassuringly on Faxon's ears. At the same moment the wandering
station-lantern, casting a transient light on the speaker, showed
his features to be in the pleasantest harmony with his voice. He
was very fair and very young--hardly in the twenties, Faxon
thought--but his face, though full of a morning freshness, was a
trifle too thin and fine-drawn, as though a vivid spirit contended
in him with a strain of physical weakness. Faxon was perhaps the
quicker to notice such delicacies of balance because his own
temperament hung on lightly vibrating nerves, which yet, as he
believed, would never quite swing him beyond the arc of a normal
sensibility.

"You expected a sleigh from Weymore?" the youth continued,
standing beside Faxon like a slender column of fur.

Mrs. Culme's secretary explained his difficulty, and the newcomer
brushed it aside with a contemptuous "Oh, Mrs. Culme!" that
carried both speakers a long way toward reciprocal understanding.

"But then you must be--" The youth broke off with a smile of
interrogation.

"The new secretary? Yes. But apparently there are no notes to be
answered this evening." Faxon's laugh deepened the sense of
solidarity which had so promptly established itself between the
two.

The newcomer laughed also. "Mrs. Culme," he explained, "was
lunching at my uncle's today, and she said you were due this
evening. But seven hours is a long time for Mrs. Culme to remember
anything."

"Well," said Faxon philosophically, "I suppose that's one of the
reasons why she needs a secretary. And I've always the inn at
Northridge," he concluded.

The youth laughed again. He was at the age when predicaments are
food for gaiety.

"Oh, but you haven't, though! It burned down last week."

"The deuce it did!" said Faxon; but the humor of the situation
struck him also before its inconvenience. His life, for years
past, had been mainly a succession of resigned adaptations, and he
had learned, before dealing practically with his embarrassments,
to extract from most of them a small tribute of amusement.

"Oh, well, there's sure to be somebody in the place who can put me
up."

"No one you could put up with. Besides, Northridge is three miles
off, and our place--in the opposite direction--is a little
nearer." Through the darkness, Faxon saw his friend sketch a
gesture of self-introduction. "My name's Frank Rainer, and I'm
staying with my uncle at Overdale. I've driven over to meet two
friends of his, who are due in a few minutes from New York. If you
don't mind waiting till they arrive I'm sure Overdale can do you
better than Northridge. We're only down from town for a few days,
but the house is always ready for a lot of people."

"But your uncle--?" Faxon could only object, with the odd sense,
through his embarrassment, that it would be magically dispelled by
his invisible friend's next words.

"Oh, my uncle--you'll see! I answer for HIM! I dare say you've
heard of him--John Lavington?"

John Lavington! There was a certain irony in asking if one had
heard of John Lavington! Even from a post of observation as
obscure as that of Mrs. Culme's secretary, the rumor of John
Lavington's money, of his pictures, his politics, his charities
and his hospitality, was as difficult to escape as the roar of a
cataract in a mountain solitude. It might almost have been said
that the one place in which one would not have expected to come
upon him was in just such a solitude as now surrounded the
speakers--at least in this deepest hour of its desertedness. But
it was just like Lavington's brilliant ubiquity to put one in the
wrong even there.

"Oh, yes, I've heard of your uncle."

"Then you WILL come, won't you? We've only five minutes to wait,"
young Rainer urged, in the tone that dispels scruples by ignoring
them; and Faxon found himself accepting the invitation as simply
as it was offered.

A delay in the arrival of the New York train lengthened their five
minutes to fifteen; and as they paced the icy platform Faxon began
to see why it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to
accede to his new acquaintance's suggestion. It was because Frank
Rainer was one of the privileged beings who simplify human
intercourse by the atmosphere of confidence and good humor they
diffuse. He produced this effect, Faxon noted, by the exercise of
no gift save his youth, of no art save his sincerity; but these
qualities were revealed in a smile of such appealing sweetness
that Faxon felt, as never before, what Nature can achieve when she
deigns to match the face with the mind.

He learned that the young man was the ward, and only nephew, of
John Lavington, with whom he had made his home since the death of
his mother, the great man's sister. Mr. Lavington, Rainer said,
had been "a regular brick" to him--"But then he is to every one,
you know"--and the young fellow's situation seemed in fact to be
perfectly in keeping with his person. Apparently the only shade
that had ever rested on him was cast by the physical weakness
which Faxon had already detected. Young Rainer had been threatened
with a disease of the lungs which, according to the highest
authorities, made banishment to Arizona or New Mexico inevitable.
"But luckily my uncle didn't pack me off, as most people would
have done, without getting another opinion. Whose? Oh, an awfully
clever chap, a young doctor with a lot of new ideas, who simply
laughed at my being sent away, and said I'd do perfectly well in
New York if I didn't dine out too much, and if I dashed off
occasionally to Northridge for a little fresh air. So it's really
my uncle's doing that I'm not in exile--and I feel no end better
since the new chap told me I needn't bother." Young Rainer went on
to confess that he was extremely fond of dining out, dancing, and
other urban distractions; and Faxon, listening to him, concluded
that the physician who had refused to cut him off altogether from
these pleasures was probably a better psychologist than his
seniors.

"All the same you ought to be careful, you know." The sense of
elder brotherly concern that forced the words from Faxon made him,
as he spoke, slip his arm impulsively through Frank Rainer's.

The latter met the movement with a responsive pressure. "Oh, I AM:
awfully, awfully. And then my uncle has such an eye on me!"

"But if your uncle has such an eye on you, what does he say to
your swallowing knives out here in this Siberian wild?"

Rainer raised his fur collar with a careless gesture. "It's not
that that does it--the cold's good for me."

"And it's not the dinners and dances? What is it, then?" Faxon
good-humoredly insisted; to which his companion answered with a
laugh: "Well, my uncle says it's being bored; and I rather think
he's right!"

His laugh ended in a spasm of coughing and a struggle for breath
that made Faxon, still holding his arm, guide him hastily into the
shelter of the fireless waiting room.

Young Rainer had dropped down on the bench against the wall and
pulled off one of his fur gloves to grope for a handkerchief. He
tossed aside his cap and drew the handkerchief across his
forehead, which was intensely white, and beaded with moisture,
though his face retained a healthy glow. But Faxon's gaze remained
fastened to the hand he had uncovered: it was so long, so
colorless, so wasted, so much older than the brow he passed it
over.

"It's queer--a healthy face but dying hands," the secretary mused;
he somehow wished young Rainer had kept on his glove.

The whistle of the express drew the young men to their feet, and
the next moment two heavily furred gentlemen had descended to the
platform and were breasting the rigor of the night. Frank Rainer
introduced them as Mr. Grisben and Mr. Balch, and Faxon, while
their luggage was being lifted into the second sleigh, discerned
them, by the roving lantern gleam, to be an elderly gray-headed
pair, apparently of the average prosperous business cut.

They saluted their host's nephew with friendly familiarity, and
Mr. Grisben, who seemed the spokesman of the two, ended his
greeting with a genial--"and many many more of them, dear boy!"
which suggested to Faxon that their arrival coincided with an
anniversary. But he could not press the inquiry, for the seat
allotted him was at the coachman's side, while Frank Rainer joined
his uncle's guests inside the sleigh.

A swift flight (behind such horses as one could be sure of John
Lavington's having) brought them to tall gateposts, an illuminated
lodge, and an avenue on which the snow had been levelled to the
smoothness of marble. At the end of the avenue the long house
loomed through trees, its principal bulk dark but one wing sending
out a ray of welcome; and the next moment Faxon was receiving a
violent impression of warmth and light, of hothouse plants,
hurrying servants, a vast spectacular oak hall like a stage
setting, and, in its unreal middle distance, a small concise
figure, correctly dressed, conventionally featured, and utterly
unlike his rather florid conception of the great John Lavington.

The shock of the contrast remained with him through his hurried
dressing in the large impersonally luxurious bedroom to which he
had been shown. "I don't see where he comes in," was the only way
he could put it, so difficult was it to fit the exuberance of
Lavington's public personality into his host's contracted frame
and manner. Mr. Lavington, to whom Faxon's case had been rapidly
explained by young Rainer, had welcomed him with a sort of dry and
stilted cordiality that exactly matched his narrow face, his stiff
hand, the whiff of scent on his evening handkerchief. "Make
yourself at home--at home!" he had repeated, in a tone that
suggested, on his own part, a complete inability to perform the
feat he urged on his visitor. "Any friend of Frank's ... delighted ...
make yourself thoroughly at home!"

II

In spite of the balmy temperature and complicated conveniences of
Faxon's bedroom, the injunction was not easy to obey. It was
wonderful luck to have found a night's shelter under the opulent
roof of Overdale, and he tasted the physical satisfaction to the
full. But the place, for all its ingenuities of comfort, was oddly
cold and unwelcoming. He couldn't have said why, and could only
suppose that Mr. Lavington's intense personality--intensely
negative, but intense all the same--must, in some occult way, have
penetrated every corner of his dwelling. Perhaps, though, it was
merely that Faxon himself was tired and hungry, more deeply
chilled than he had known till he came in from the cold, and
unutterably sick of all strange houses, and of the prospect of
perpetually treading other people's stairs.

"I hope you're not famished?" Rainer's slim figure was in the
doorway. "My uncle has a little business to attend to with Mr.
Grisben, and we don't dine for half an hour. Shall I fetch you, or
can you find your way down? Come straight to the dining room--the
second door on the left of the long gallery."

He disappeared, leaving a ray of warmth behind him, and Faxon,
relieved, lit a cigarette and sat down by the fire.

Looking about with less haste, he was struck by a detail that had
escaped him. The room was full of flowers--a mere "bachelor's
room," in the wing of a house opened only for a few days, in the
dead middle of a New Hampshire winter! Flowers were everywhere,
not in senseless profusion, but placed with the same conscious art
he had remarked in the grouping of the blossoming shrubs that
filled the hall. A vase of arums stood on the writing table, a
cluster of strange-hued carnations on the stand at his elbow, and
from wide bowls of glass and porcelain clumps of freesia bulbs
diffused their melting fragrance. The fact implied acres of glass
--but that was the least interesting part of it. The flowers
themselves, their quality, selection and arrangement, attested on
some one's part--and on whose but John Lavington's?--a solicitous
and sensitive passion for that particular embodiment of beauty.
Well, it simply made the man, as he had appeared to Faxon, all the
harder to understand!

The half-hour elapsed, and Faxon, rejoicing at the near prospect
of food, set out to make his way to the dining room. He had not
noticed the direction he had followed in going to his room, and
was puzzled, when he left it, to find that two staircases, of
apparently equal importance, invited him. He chose the one to his
right, and reached, at its foot, a long gallery such as Rainer had
described. The gallery was empty, the doors down its length were
closed; but Rainer had said: "The second to the left," and Faxon,
after pausing for some chance enlightenment which did not come,
laid his hand on the second knob to the left.

The room he entered was square, with dusky picture-hung walls. In
its centre, about a table lit by veiled lamps, he fancied Mr.
Lavington and his guests to be already seated at dinner; then he
perceived that the table was covered not with viands but with
papers, and that he had blundered into what seemed to be his
host's study. As he paused in the irresolution of embarrassment
Frank Rainer looked up.

"Oh, here's Mr. Faxon. Why not ask him--?"

Mr. Lavington, from the end of the table, reflected his nephew's
smile in a glance of impartial benevolence.

"Certainly. Come in, Mr. Faxon. If you won't think it a liberty--"

Mr. Grisben, who sat opposite his host, turned his solid head
toward the door. "Of course Mr. Faxon's an American citizen?"

Frank Rainer laughed. "That all right! ... Oh, no, not one of your
pin-pointed pens, Uncle Jack! Haven't you got a quill somewhere?"

Mr. Balch, who spoke slowly and as if reluctantly, in a muffled
voice of which there seemed to be very little left, raised his
hand to say: "One moment: you acknowledge this to be--?"

"My last will and testament?" Rainer's laugh redoubled. "Well, I
won't answer for the 'last.' It's the first one, anyway."

"It's a mere formula," Mr. Balch explained.

"Well, here goes." Rainer dipped his quill in the inkstand his
uncle had pushed in his direction, and dashed a gallant signature
across the document.

Faxon, understanding what was expected of him, and conjecturing
that the young man was signing his will on the attainment of his
majority, had placed himself behind Mr. Grisben, and stood
awaiting his turn to affix his name to the instrument. Rainer,
having signed, was about to push the paper across the table to Mr.
Balch; but the latter, again raising his hand, said in his sad
imprisoned voice: "The seal--?"

"Oh, does there have to be a seal?"

Faxon, looking over Mr. Grisben at John Lavington, saw a faint
frown between his impassive eyes. "Really, Frank!" He seemed,
Faxon thought, slightly irritated by his nephew's frivolity.

"Who's got a seal?" Frank Rainer continued, glancing about the
table. "There doesn't seem to be one here."

Mr. Grisben interposed. "A wafer will do. Lavington, you have a
wafer?"

Mr. Lavington had recovered his serenity. "There must be some in
one of the drawers. But I'm ashamed to say I don't know where my
secretary keeps these things. He ought, of course, to have seen to
it that a wafer was sent with the document."

"Oh, hang it--" Frank Rainer pushed the paper aside: "It's the
hand of God--and I'm hungry as a wolf. Let's dine first, Uncle
Jack."

"I think I've a seal upstairs," said Faxon suddenly.

Mr. Lavington sent him a barely perceptible smile. "So sorry to
give you the trouble--"

"Oh, I say, don't send him after it now. Let's wait till after
dinner!"

Mr. Lavington continued to smile on his guest, and the latter, as
if under the faint coercion of the smile, turned from the room and
ran upstairs. Having taken the seal from his writing-case he came
down again, and once more opened the door of the study. No one was
speaking when he entered--they were evidently awaiting his return
with the mute impatience of hunger, and he put the seal in
Rainer's reach, and stood watching while Mr. Grisben struck a
match and held it to one of the candles flanking the inkstand. As
the wax descended on the paper Faxon remarked again the singular
emaciation, the premature physical weariness, of the hand that
held it: he wondered if Mr. Lavington had ever noticed his
nephew's hand, and if it were not poignantly visible to him now.

With this thought in his mind, Faxon raised his eyes to look at
Mr. Lavington. The great man's gaze rested on Frank Rainer with an
expression of untroubled benevolence; and at the same instant
Faxon's attention was attracted by the presence in the room of
another person, who must have joined the group while he was
upstairs searching for the seal. The new-comer was a man of about
Mr. Lavington's age and figure, who stood directly behind his
chair, and who, at the moment when Faxon first saw him, was gazing
at young Rainer with an equal intensity of attention. The likeness
between the two men--perhaps increased by the fact that the hooded
lamps on the table left the figure behind the chair in shadow--
struck Faxon the more because of the strange contrast in their
expression. John Lavington, during his nephew's blundering attempt
to drop the wax and apply the seal, continued to fasten on him a
look of half-amused affection; while the man behind the chair, so
oddly reduplicating the lines of his features and figure, turned
on the boy a face of pale hostility.

The impression was so startling Faxon forgot what was going on
about him. He was just dimly aware of young Rainer's exclaiming:
"Your turn, Mr. Grisben!" of Mr. Grisben's ceremoniously
protesting: "No--no; Mr. Faxon first," and of the pen's being
thereupon transferred to his own hand. He received it with a
deadly sense of being unable to move, or even to understand what
was expected of him, till he became conscious of Mr. Grisben's
paternally pointing out the precise spot on which he was to leave
his autograph. The effort to fix his attention and steady his hand
prolonged the process of signing, and when he stood up--a strange
weight of fatigue on all his limbs--the figure behind Mr.
Lavington's chair was gone.

Faxon felt an immediate sense of relief. It was puzzling that the
man's exit should have been so rapid and noiseless, but the door
behind Mr. Lavington was screened by a tapestry hanging, and Faxon
concluded that the unknown looker-on had merely had to raise it to
pass out. At any rate, he was gone, and with his withdrawal the
strange weight was lifted. Young Rainer was lighting a cigarette,
Mr. Balch meticulously inscribing his name at the foot of the
document, Mr. Lavington--his eyes no longer on his nephew--
examining a strange white-winged orchid in the vase at his elbow.
Everything suddenly seemed to have grown natural and simple again,
and Faxon found himself responding with a smile to the affable
gesture with which his host declared: "And now, Mr. Faxon, we'll
dine."

III

"I wonder how I blundered into the wrong room just now; I thought
you told me to take the second door to the left," Faxon said to
Frank Rainer as they followed the older men down the gallery.

"So I did; but I probably forgot to tell you which staircase to
take. Coming from your bedroom, I ought to have said the fourth
door to the right. It's a puzzling house, because my uncle keeps
adding to it from year to year. He built this room last summer for
his modern pictures."

Young Rainer, pausing to open another door, touched an electric
button which sent a circle of light about the walls of a long room
hung with canvases of the French impressionist school.

Faxon advanced, attracted by a shimmering Monet, but Rainer laid a
hand on his arm.

"He bought that last week for a thundering price. But come along--
I'll show you all this after dinner. Or HE will rather--he loves
it."

"Does he really love things?"

Rainer stared, clearly perplexed at the question. "Rather! Flowers
and pictures especially! Haven't you noticed the flowers? I
suppose you think his manner's cold; it seems so at first; but
he's really awfully keen about things."

Faxon looked quickly at the speaker. "Has your uncle a brother?"

"Brother? No--never had. He and my mother were the only ones."

"Or any relation who--who looks like him? Who might be mistaken
for him?"

"Not that I ever heard of. Does he remind you of some one?"

"Yes."

"That's queer. We'll ask him if he's got a double. Come on!"

But another picture had arrested Faxon, and some minutes elapsed
before he and his young host reached the dining-room. It was a
large room, with the same conventionally handsome furniture and
delicately grouped flowers; and Faxon's first glance showed him
that only three men were seated about the dining-table. The man
who had stood behind Mr. Lavington's chair was not present, and no
seat awaited him.

When the young men entered, Mr. Grisben was speaking, and his
host, who faced the door, sat looking down at his untouched soup-
plate and turning the spoon about in his small dry hand.

"It's pretty late to call them rumors--they were devilish close to
facts when we left town this morning," Mr. Grisben was saying,
with an unexpected incisiveness of tone.

Mr. Lavington laid down his spoon and smiled interrogatively. "Oh,
facts--what are facts! Just the way a thing happens to look at a
given minute."

"You haven't heard anything from town?" Mr. Grisben persisted.

"Not a syllable. So you see ... Balch, a little more of that
petite marmite. Mr. Faxon ... between Frank and Mr. Grisben,
please."

The dinner progressed through a series of complicated courses,
ceremoniously dispensed by a stout butler attended by three tall
footmen, and it was evident that Mr. Lavington took a somewhat
puerile satisfaction in the pageant. That, Faxon reflected, was
probably the joint in his armor--that and the flowers. He had
changed the subject--not abruptly but firmly--when the young men
entered, but Faxon perceived that it still possessed the thoughts
of the two elderly visitors, and Mr. Balch presently observed, in
a voice that seemed to come from the last survivor down a mine-
shaft: "If it does come, it will be the biggest crash since '93."

Mr. Lavington looked bored but polite. "Wall Street can stand
crashes better than it could then. It's got a robuster
constitution."

"Yes; but--"

"Speaking of constitutions," Mr. Grisben intervened: "Frank, are
you taking care of yourself?"

A flush rose to young Rainer's cheeks.

"Why, of course! Isn't that what I'm here for?"

"You're here about three days in the month, aren't you? And the
rest of the time it's crowded restaurants and hot ballrooms in
town. I thought you were to be shipped off to New Mexico?"

"Oh, I've got a new man who says that's rot."

"Well, you don't look as if your new man were right," said Mr.
Grisben bluntly.

Faxon saw the lad's color fade, and the rings of shadow deepen
under his gay eyes. At the same moment his uncle turned to him
with a renewed intensity of attention. There was such solicitude
in Mr. Lavington's gaze that it seemed almost to fling a tangible
shield between his nephew and Mr. Grisben's tactless scrutiny.

"We think Frank's a good deal better," he began; "this new doctor--"

The butler, coming up, bent discreetly to whisper a word in his
ear, and the communication caused a sudden change in Mr.
Lavington's expression. His face was naturally so colorless that
it seemed not so much to pale as to fade, to dwindle and recede
into something blurred and blotted-out. He half rose, sat down
again and sent a rigid smile about the table.

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