The Spenders Part 42

"It certainly does look good--and Burman has learned the ropes and spars. They're already calling him the 'corn-king' out on the Chicago Board of Trade."

"Use your own judgment," Uncle Peter urged him. "You're the one that knows all about these things. My Lord! how you ever _do_ manage to keep things runnin' in your head gets me. If you got confidence in Burman, all I can say is--well, your pa was a fine judge of men, and I don't see why you shouldn't have the gift."

"Between you and me, Uncle Peter, I _am_ a good judge of human nature, and I know this much about Burman: when he does win out he'll win big.

And I think he's going to whipsaw the market to a standstill this time, for sure. Here's a little item from this morning's paper that sounds right, all along the line."

"COPPER, CORN, AND CORDAGE.

"There are just now three great movements in the market, Copper Trust stock, corn, and cordage stock. The upward movement in corn seems to be in the main not speculative but natural--the result of a short supply and a long demand. The movements in Copper and Cordage Trust stocks are purely speculative. The copper movement is based on this proposition: Can the Copper Trust maintain the price for standard copper at seventeen cents a pound, in face of enormously increased supply and the rapidly decreasing demand, notably in Germany? The bears think not. The bulls, contrarily, persist in behaving as if they had inside information of a superior value. Just possibly a simultaneous rise in corn, copper, and cordage will be the next sensation in the trading world."

"You see?" said Percival. "They're beginning to wake up, down there--beginning to turn over in their sleep and mutter. Pretty soon they'll begin to stretch lazily; when they finally hear something drop and jump out of bed it will be too late. The bulls will be counting their chips to cash in, and the man waiting around to put out the lights. And I don't see why Burman isn't as safe as I am." "I don't, either," said Uncle Peter.

"'A short supply and a long demand,'--it would be a sin to let any one else in. I'll just wire him we're on, and that we need all of that good thing ourselves."

In the flush of his great plans and great expectations came a chance meeting with Miss Milbrey. He had seen her only at a distance since their talk at Newport. Yet the thought of her had persisted as a plaintive undertone through all the days after. Only the sharp hurt to his sensitive pride--from the conviction that she had found him tolerable solely because of the money--had saved him from the willing admission to himself that he had carried off too much of her ever to forget. In his quiet moments, the tones of her clear, low voice came movingly to his ears, and his eyes conjured involuntarily her girlish animation, her rounded young form, her colour and fire--the choked, smouldering fire of opals. He saw the curve of her wrist, the confident swing of her walk, the easy poise of her head, her bearing, at once girlish and womanly, the little air, half of wistful appeal, and half of self-reliant a.s.sertion. Yet he failed not to regard these indulgences as utter folly. It had been folly enough while he believed that she stood ready to accept him and his wealth. It was more flagrant, now that her quest for a husband with millions had been so handsomely rewarded.

But again, the fact that she was now clearly impossible for him, so that even a degrading submission on his part could no longer secure her, served only to bring her attractiveness into greater relief. With the fear gone that a sudden impulse to possess her might lead him to stultify himself, he could see more clearly than ever why she was and promised always to be to him the very dearest woman in the world--dearest in spite of all he could reason about so lucidly. He felt, then, a little shock of unreasoning joy to find one night that they were dining together at the Oldakers'.

At four o'clock he had received a hasty note signed "Fidelia Oldaker,"

penned in the fine, precise script of some young ladies' finis.h.i.+ng school--perhaps extinct now for fifty years--imploring him, if aught of chivalry survived within his breast, to fetch his young grandfather and dine with her that evening. Two men had inconsiderately succ.u.mbed, at this eleventh hour, to the prevailing grip-epidemic, and the lady threw herself confidently on the well-known generosity of the Bines male--"like one of the big, stout nets those acrobatic people fall into from their high bars," she concluded.

Uncle Peter was more than willing. He liked the Oldakers.

"They're the only sane folks I've met among your friends," he had told his grandson. He had dined there frequently during the winter, and professed to be enamoured of the hostess. That fragile but sprightly bit of antiquity professed in turn to find Uncle Peter a very dangerous man among the ladies. They flirted outrageously at every opportunity, and Uncle Peter sent her more violets than many a popular _debutante_ received that winter.

Percival, with his new air of Wall Street operator, was inclined to hesitate.

"You know I'm up early now, Uncle Peter, to get the day's run of the markets before I go downtown, and a man can't do much in the way of dinners when his mind is working all day. Perhaps Mauburn will go."

But Mauburn was taking Psyche and Mrs. Drelmer to the first night of a play, and Percival was finally persuaded by the old man to relax, for one evening, the austerity of his _regime_.

"But how your pa would love to see you so conscientious," he said, "and you with Wall Street, or a good part of it, right under your heel, just like _that_," and the old man ground his heel viciously into the carpet.

When Percival found Shepler with Mrs. Van Geist and Miss Milbrey among the Oldakers' guests, he rejoiced. Now he would talk to her without any of that old awkward self-consciousness. He was even audacious enough to insist that Mrs. Oldaker direct him to take Miss Milbrey out to dinner.

"I claim it as the price of coming, you know, when I was only an afterthought."

"You shall be paid, sir," his hostess declared, "if you consider it pay to sit beside an engaged girl whose mind is full of her _trousseau_.

And here's this captivating young scapegrace relative of yours. What price does he demand for coming?" and she glanced up at Uncle Peter with arch liberality in her bright eyes.

That gentleman bowed low--a bow that had been the admiration of the smartest society in Marietta County, Ohio, fifty years and more ago.

"I'm paid fur coming by coming," he replied, urbanely.

"There, now!" cried his hostess, "that's pretty, and means something.

You shall take me in for that."

"I'll have to give you a credit-slip, ma'am. You've overpaid me." And Mrs. Oldaker, with a coy fillip of her fan, called him a naughty boy.

"Here, Rulon," she called to Shepler, "are two young daredevils who've been good enough to save me as many empty chairs. Now you shall take out Cornelia, and this juvenile sprig shall relieve you of Avice Milbrey. It's a providence. You engaged couples are always so dull when you're banished from your own _ciel a deux_."

Shepler bowed and greeted the two men. Percival sought Miss Milbrey, who was with her aunt at the other side of the old-fas.h.i.+oned room, a room whose brocade hangings had been imported from England in the days of the Georges, and whose furniture was fabricated in the time when France was suffering its last kings.

He no longer felt the presence of anything overt between them. The girl herself seemed to have regained the charming frankness of her first manner with him. Their relations.h.i.+p was defined irrevocably. No uncertainty of doubt or false seeming lurked now under the surface to perplex and embarra.s.s. The relief was felt at once by each.

"I'm to have the pleasure of taking you in, Miss Milbrey--hostess issues special commands to that effect."

"Isn't that jolly! We've not met for an age."

"And I've such an appet.i.te for talk with you, I fear I won't eat a thing. If I'd known you were to be here I'd have taken the forethought to eat a gored ox, or something--what is the proverb, 'better a dinner of stalled ox where--'"

"'Where talk is,'" suggested Miss Milbrey, quickly.

"Oh, yes--.' than to have your own ox gored without a word of talk.' I remember it perfectly now. And--there--we're moving on to this feast of reason--"

"And the flow of something superior to reason," finished Shepler, who had come over for Mrs. Van Geist. "Oldaker has some port that lay in the wood in his cellar for forty years--and went around the world between keel and canvas."

"That sounds good," said Percival, and then to Miss Milbrey, "But come, let us reason together." His next sentiment, unuttered, was that the soft touch of her hand under his arm was headier than any drink, how ancient soever.

Throughout the dinner their entire absorption in each other was all but unbroken. Percival never could remember who had sat at his left; and Miss Milbrey's right-hand neighbour saw more than the winning line of her profile but twice. Percival began--

"Do you know, I've never been able to cla.s.sify you at all. I never could tell how to take you."

"I'll tell you a secret, Mr. Bines; I think I'm not to be taken at all.

I've begun to suspect that I'm like one of those words that haven't any rhyme--like 'orange' and 'month,' you know."

"But you find poetry in life? I do."

"Plenty of verse--not much poetry."

"How would you order life now, if the little old wis.h.i.+ng-lady came to your door and knocked?"

And they plunged forthwith, buoyed by youth's divine effrontery, into mysteries that have vexed diners, not less than hermit sages, since "the fog of old time" first obscured truth. Of life and death--the ugliness of life, and the beauty of death--

"... even as death might smile, Petting the plumes of some surprised soul,"

quoted the girl. Of loving and hating, they talked; of trying and failing--of the implacable urge under which men must strive in the face of certain defeat--of the probability that men are purposely born fools, since, if they were born wise they would refuse to strive; whereupon life and death would merge, and naught would prevail but a vast indifference. In fact, they were very deep, and affected to consider these grave matters seriously. They affected that they never habitually thought of lesser concerns. And they had the air of listening to each other as if they were weighing the words judicially, and were quite above any mere sensuous considerations of personality.

Once they emerged long enough to hear the hostess speaking, as it were of yesterday, of a day when the new "German cotillion" was introduced, to make a sensation in New York; of a time when the best ballrooms were heated with wood stoves and lighted with lamps; and of a later but apparently still remote time when the a.s.semblies were "really, quite the smartest function of the season."

In another pause, they caught the kernel of a story being told by Uncle Peter:

"The girl was a half-breed, but had a fair skin and the biggest shock of hair you ever saw--bright yellow hair. She was awful proud of her hair. So when her husband, Clem Dewler, went to this priest, Father McNally, and complained that she _would_ run away from the shack and hang around the dance-halls down at this mining-camp, Father McNally made up his mind to learn her a lesson. Well, he goes down and finds her jest comin' out of Tim Healy's place with two other women. He rushes up to her, catches hold of this big shock of hair that was trailin' behind her, and before she knew what was comin' he whipped out a big pair of sharp, s.h.i.+ny shears, and made as if he was going to give her a hair-cut. At that she begins to scream, but the priest he wouldn't let go. 'I'll cut it off,' he says, 'close,' he says, 'if you don't swear on this crucifix to be a good squaw to Clem Dewler, and never set so much as one of your little feet in these places again.'

She could feel the shears against her hair, and she was so scared she swore like he told her. And so she was that afraid of losin' her fine yellow hair afterward, knowin' Father McNally was a man that didn't make no idle threats, that she kept prim and proper--fur a half-breed."

"That poor creature had countless sisters," was Miss Milbrey's comment to Percival. And they fell together once more in deciding whether, after all, the brightest women ever cease to believe that men are influenced most by surface beauties. They fired each other's enthusiasm for expressing opinions, and they took the opinions very seriously. Yet of their meeting, to an observer, their talk would have seemed the part least worth recording.