The Happiest Time of Their Lives Part 42

"Of course you're a sn.o.b, Wilsey."

Mr. Wilsey smiled temperately.

"What do you mean by the word?"

It was a question about which Lanley had been thinking, and he answered:

"I mean a person who values himself for qualities that have no moral, financial, or intellectual value whatsoever. You, for instance, Wilsey, value yourself not because you are a pretty good lawyer, but because your great-grandfather signed the Declaration."

A shade of slight embarra.s.sment crossed the lawyer's face.

"I own," he said, "that I value birth, but so do you, Lanley. You attach importance to being a New York Lanley."

"I do," answered Lanley; "but I have sense enough to be ashamed of doing so. You're proud of being proud of your old Signer."

"As a matter of fact," Mr. Wilsey remarked slowly, "Josiah Wilsey did not sign the Declaration."

"What!" cried Lanley. "You've always told me he did."

Wilsey shook his head gently, as one who went about correcting errors.

"No. What I said was that I feel no moral doubt he would have signed it if an attack of illness--"

Lanley gave a short roar.

"That's just like _you_, Wilsey. You wouldn't have signed it, either. You would have said that while in cordial sympathy with the ideas set forth, you would not care to put your name to a doc.u.ment that might give pain to a monarch who, though not as liberal as some of us could wish, was yet--"

"As a matter of fact," Wilsey began again even more coldly, "I should have signed--"

"Oh, you think so now. A hundred years from now you'd sign a pet.i.tion for the eight-hour law."

"Never!" said Wilsey, raising his hand. "I should never put my name to a doc.u.ment--" He stopped at another roar from his friend, and never took the sentence up again, but indicated with a gesture that only legal minds were worth arguing with on points of this sort.

When he had gone, Lanley dipped the spoon in his oyster stew with not a little pleasure. Nothing, apparently, could have raised his spirits more than the knowledge that old Josiah Wilsey had not signed the Declaration.

He actually chuckled a little. "So like Wilsey himself," he thought. "No moral courage; calls it conservatism." Then his joy abated. Just so, he thought, must he himself appear to Mrs. Wayne. Yet his self-respect insisted that his case was different. Loyalty had been responsible not for his conservatism, but for the pig-headedness with which he had acted upon it. He would have asked nothing better than to profess himself open-minded to Mrs. Wayne's views, only he could not desert Adelaide in the moment of her struggle for beliefs in which he himself had brought her up. And now she had deserted him. He alone was left to flaunt a banner the motto of which he didn't wholly believe, while Adelaide, at a word from Vincent, had gone over to the other side. And no one knew what his loyalty had cost him. Long ago, in his first year at college, he had flunked the examination of the professor whom he reverenced above all others. No one had cared, no one had long remembered, except Lanley himself, and he had remembered because some one had told him what the professor said on reading his paper. It was nothing but, "I had supposed Lanley was intelligent." Never again had he had that professor's attention for a single instant. This, it seemed to him, was about to happen to him again, now when it was too late in his life to do anything but despair.

He called the waiter, paid his bill and tip,--he was an extremely liberal tipper; "it's expected of us," he used to say, meaning that it was expected of people like the New York Lanleys,--and went away.

In old times he had been an inventor of many clever tricks for getting up-town by unpopular elevated trains and horse-cars that avoided the crowd, but the subway was a great leveler, and he knew no magic except to take a local in rush hours. At three o'clock, however, even this was not necessary. He took an express, and got off at the Grand Central, turned up Park Avenue, and then east. He had just found out that he was going to visit Mrs. Wayne.

He read the names in the vestibule, never doubting that Dr. Parret was a masculine pract.i.tioner, and hesitated at the name of Wayne. He thought he ought to ring the bell, but he wanted to go straight up.

Some one had left the front door unlatched. He pushed it open and began the steep ascent.

She came to the door of the flat herself. She had a funny little gray shawl about her shoulders and a pen in her hand. She tried to make her voice sound very cordial as she greeted him, but he thought he caught something that sounded as if, while perfectly well disposed to him, she couldn't for the life of her imagine why he had come.

"Come in," she said, "though I'm afraid it's a little cold in here. Our janitor--"

"Let me light your fire for you," he answered, and extracting a parlor-match from his pocket,--safety-matches were his bugbear,--he stooped, and put the flame to the fire. As he did so he understood that it was not the mere forgetfulness of a servant that had left it unlighted, but probably a deliberate economy, and he rose crimson and unhappy.

It took him some time to recover, and during the entire time she sat in her gray shawl, looking very amiable, but plainly unable to think of anything to say.

"I saw your son in Farron's office to-day."

"Mr. Farron has been so kind, so wonderfully kind!"

Only a guilty conscience could have found reproach in this statement, and Lanley said:

"And I hear he is dining at my daughter's this evening."

Mrs. Wayne had had a telephone message to that effect.

"I wondered, if you were alone--" Lanley hesitated. He had of course been going to ask her to come and dine with him, but a better inspiration came to him. "I wondered if you would ask me to dine with you."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," said Mrs. Wayne, "but I can't. I have a boy coming.

He's studying for the ministry, the most interesting person. He had not been sober for three years when I took hold of him, and now he hasn't touched a drop for two."

He sighed. She said she was sorry, but he could see plainly enough that any reformed, or even more any unreformed, drunkard would always far surpa.s.s him in ability to command her interest. He did not belong to a generation that cleared things up with words; he would have thought it impertinent, almost ungentlemanly, to probe her att.i.tude of mind about the scene at Adelaide's; and he would have considered himself unmanly to make any plea to her on the ground of his own suffering. One simply supported such things as best one could; it was expected of one, like tipping waiters. He had neither the vocabulary nor the habit of mind that made an impersonal exposition of an emotional difficulty possible; but even had he possessed these powers he would have retained his tradition against using them. Perhaps, if she had been his sister or his wife, he might have admitted that he had had a hard day or that every one had moments of depression; but that was not the way to talk in a lady's drawing-room. In the silence he saw her eyes steal longingly to her writing-table, deeply and hopelessly littered with papers and open books.

"I'm afraid I'm detaining you," he said. The visit had been a failure.

"Oh, not at all," she replied, and then added in a tone of more sincerity: "I do have the most terrible time with my check-book. And,"

she added, as one confessing to an absurdly romantic ideal, "I was trying to balance it."

"You should not be troubled with such things," said Mr. Lanley, thinking how long it was since any one but a secretary had balanced his books.

Pete, it appeared, usually did attend to his mother's checks, but of late she had not liked to bother him, and that was just the moment the bank had chosen to notify her that she had overdrawn. "I don't see how I can be," she said, too hopeless to deny it.

"If you would allow me," said Mr. Lanley. "I am an excellent bookkeeper."

"Oh, I shouldn't like to trouble you," said Mrs. Wayne, but she made it clear she would like it above everything; so Lanley put on his spectacles, drew up his chair, and squared his elbows to the job.

"It hasn't been balanced since--dear me! not since October," he said.

"I know; but I draw such small checks."

"But you draw a good many."

She had risen, and was standing before the fire, with her hands behind her back. Her shawl had slipped off, and she looked, in her short walking-skirt, rather like a school-girl being reprimanded for a poor exercise. She felt so when, looking up at her over his spectacles, he observed severely:

"You really must be more careful about carrying forward. Twice you have carried forward an amount from two pages back instead of--"

"That's always the way," she interrupted. "Whenever people look at my check-book they take so long scolding me about the way I do it that there's no time left for putting it right."

"I won't say another word," returned Lanley; "only it would really help you--"

"I don't want any one to do it who says my sevens are like fours," she went on. Lanley compressed his lips slightly, but contented himself by merely lengthening the tail of a seven. He said nothing more, but every time he found an error he gave a little shake of his head that went through her like a knife.

The task was a long one. The light of the winter afternoon faded, and she lit the lamps before he finished. At first he had tried not to be aware of revelations that the book made; but as he went on and he found he was obliged now and then to question her about payments and receipts, he saw that she was so utterly without any sense of privacy in the matter that his own decreased.