The Romance of a Plain Man

A slight sound made me turn, and I saw Bonny Page standing alone in the doorway, and looking straight at me with her dancing eyes.

"I don't know you yet, Ben," she said in the direct, gallant manner of a perfect horsewoman, "but I'm going to like you."

"Please try," I answered, "and I'll do my best not to make it hard."

"I don't think it will be hard, but even if it were, I'd do it for Sally's sake. Sally is my darling."

"And mine. So we're alike in one thing at least."

"I'm perfectly furious with Aunt Mitty. I mean to tell her so the next time I've taken a high jump."

"Poor Miss Mitty. How can she help herself? She was born that way."

"Well, it was a very bad way to be born – to want to break Sally's heart. Do you know, I think it was delightful – the way you did it. If I'm ever married, I want to run away, too, – only I'll run away on horseback, because that will be far more exciting."

She ran on merrily, partly I knew to take my measure while she watched me, partly to ease the embarrassment which her exquisite social instinct had at once discerned. She was charming, friendly, almost affectionate, yet I was conscious all the time that, in spite of herself, she was a little critical, a trifle aloof. Her perfect grooming, the very fineness of her self-possession, her high-bred gallantry of manner, and even the shining gloss on her black, beribboned hair, and her high boots, produced in me a sense of remoteness, which I found it impossible altogether to overcome.

In a little while there was a flutter on the staircase, and the other girls trooped down, with Sally in their midst. She had changed her travelling dress for a gown of white, cut low at the neck, and about her throat she wore a necklace of pearls I had given her at her wedding. There was a bright flush in her face, and she looked to me as she had done that day, in her red shoes, in Saint John's churchyard.

When I came downstairs from my dressing-room, I found that the girls had gone, and she was standing by the dinner table, with her face bent down over the vase of pink roses in the centre.

"So we are in our own home, darling, at last," I said, and a few minutes later, as I looked across the pink candle shades and the roses, and saw her sitting opposite to me, I told myself that at last both the fighter in me and the dreamer had found the fulfilment of their desire.

After dinner, when I had had my smoke in the library, we caught hands and wandered like two children over the new house – into the pink and white guest room, and then into Sally's bedroom, where the blue roses sprawled over the chintz-covered furniture and the silk curtains. A glass door gave on a tiny balcony, and throwing a shawl about her head and her bare shoulders, she went with me out into the frosty December night, where a cold bright moon was riding high above the church steeples. With my arm about her, and her head on my breast, we stood in silence gazing over the city, while the sense of her nearness, of her throbbing spirit and body, filled my heart with an exquisite peace.

"You and I are the world, Ben."

"You are my world, anyway."

"It is such a happy world to-night. There is nothing but love in it – no pain, no sorrow, no disappointment. Why doesn't everybody love, I wonder?"

"Everybody hasn't you."

"I'm so sorry for poor Aunt Mitty, – she never loved, – and for poor Aunt Matoaca, because she didn't love my lover. Oh, you are so strong, Ben; that, I think, is why I first loved you! I see you always in the background of my thoughts pushing that wheel up the hill."

"That won you. And to think if I'd known you were there, Sally, I couldn't have done it."

"That, too, is why I love you, so there's another reason! It isn't only your strength, Ben, it is, I believe, still more your self-forgetfulness. Then you forgot yourself because you thought of the poor horse; and again, do you remember the day of Aunt Matoaca's death, when you gave her your arm and took her little flag in your hand? You would have marched all the way to the Capitol just like that, and I don't believe you would ever have known that it looked ridiculous or that people were laughing at you."

"To tell the truth, Sally, I should never have cared."

She clung closer, her perfumed hair on my breast.

"And yet they wondered why I loved you," she murmured; "they wondered why!"

"Can you guess why I loved you?" I asked. "Was it for your red shoes? Or for that tiny scar like a dimple I've always adored?"

"I never told you what made that," she said, after a moment. "I was a very little baby when my father got angry with mamma one day – he had been drinking – and he upset the cradle in which I was asleep."

She lifted her face, and I kissed the scar under the white shawl.

The next day when I came home to luncheon, she told me that she had been to her old home to see Miss Mitty.

"I couldn't stand the thought of her loneliness, so I went into the drawing-room at the hour I knew she would be tending her sweet alyssum and Dicky, the canary. She was there, looking very thin and old, and, Ben, she treated me like a stranger. She wouldn't kiss me, and she didn't ask me a single question – only spoke of the weather and her flower boxes, as if I had called for the first time."

"I know, I know," I said, taking her into my arms.

"And everybody else is so kind. People have been sending me flowers all day. Did you ever see such a profusion? They are all calling, too, – the Fitzhughs, the Harrisons, the Tuckers, the Mayos, Jennie Randolph came, and old Mrs. Tucker, who never goes anywhere since her daughter died, and Charlotte Peyton, and all the Corbins in a bunch." Then her tone changed. "Ben," she said, "I want to see that little sister of yours. Will you take me there this afternoon?"

Something in her request, or in the way she uttered it, touched me to the heart.

"I'd like you to see Jessy – she's pretty enough to look at – but I didn't mean you to marry my family, you know."

"I know you didn't, dear, but I've married everything of yours all the same. If you can spare a few minutes after luncheon, we'll drive down and speak to her."

I could spare the few minutes, and when the carriage was ready, she came down in her hat and furs, and we went at a merry pace down Franklin Street to the boarding-house in which Jessy was living. As we drove up to the pavement, the door of the house opened and my little sister came out, dressed for walking and looking unusually pretty.

"Why, Ben, she's a beauty!" said Sally, in a whisper, as the girl approached us. To me Jessy's face had always appeared too cold and vacant for beauty, in spite of her perfect features and the brilliant fairness of her complexion. Even now I missed the glow of feeling or of animation in her glance, as she crossed the pavement with her slow, precise walk, and put her hand into Sally's.

"How do you do? It is very kind of you to come," she said in a measured, correct voice.

"Of course I came, Jessy. I am your new sister, and you must come and stay with me when I am out of mourning."

"Thank you," responded Jessy gravely, "I should like to."

The cold had touched her cheek until it looked like tinted marble, and under her big black hat her blond hair rolled in natural waves from her forehead.

"Are you happy here, Jessy?" I asked.

"They are very kind to me. There's an old gentleman boarding here now from the West. He is going to give us a theatre party to-night. They say he has millions." For the first time the glow of enthusiasm shone in her limpid blue eyes.

"A good use to make of his millions," I laughed. "Do you hear often from President, Jessy?"

The glow faded from her eyes and they grew cold again. "He writes such bad letters," she answered, "I can hardly read them."

"Never forget," I answered sternly, "that he denied himself an education in order that you might become what you are."

While I spoke the door of the house opened again, and the old gentleman she had alluded to came gingerly down the steps. He had a small, wizened face, and he wore a fur-lined overcoat, in which it was evident that he still suffered from the cold.

"This is my brother and my sister, Mr. Cottrel," said Jessy, as he came slowly toward us.

He bowed with a pompous manner, and stood twirling the chain of his eye-glasses. "Yes, yes, I have heard of your brother. His name is well known already," he answered. "I congratulate, sir," he added, "not the 'man who got rich quickly,' as I've heard you called, but the fortunate brother of a beautiful sister."

"What a perfectly horrid old man," remarked Sally, some minutes later, as we drove back again. "I think, Ben, we'll have to take the little sister. She's a beauty."

"If she wasn't so everlastingly cold and quiet."

"It suits her style – that little precise way she has. There's a look about her like one of Perugino's saints."

Then the carriage stopped at the office, and I returned, with a high heart, to the game.

CHAPTER XXI

I AM THE WONDER OF THE HOUR

During the first year of my marriage I was already spoken of as the most successful speculator in the state. The whirlpool of finance had won me from the road, and I had sacrificed the single allegiance to the bolder moves of the game. Yet if I could be bold, I was cautious, too, – and that peculiar quality which the General called "financial genius," and the world named "the luck of the speculator," had enabled me to act always between the two dangerous extremes of timidity and rashness. "To get up when others sat down, and to sit down when others got up," I told the General one day, had been the rule by which I had played.

"They were talking of you at the club last night, Ben," he said. "You were the only one of us who had sense enough to load up with A. P. & C. stock when it was selling at 80, and now it's jumped up to 150. Jim Randolph was fool enough to remark that you'd had the easiest success of any man he knew."

"Easy? Does he think so?"

"So you call that easy, gentlemen?' I responded. 'Well, I tell you that boy has sweated for it since he was seven years old. It's the only way, too, I'm sure of it. If you want to succeed, you've got to begin by sweating.'"

"Thank you, General, but I suppose most things look easy until you've tried them."

"It doesn't look easy to me, Ben, when I've seen you at it all day and half the night since you were a boy. What I said to those fellows at the club is the Gospel truth – there's but one way to get anything in this world, and that is by sweating for it."

We were in his study, to which he was confined by an attack of the gout, and at such times he loved to ramble on in his aging, reminiscent habit.

"You know, General," I said, "that they want me to accept the presidency of the Union Bank in Jennings' place. I've been one of the directors, you see, for the last three or four years."

"You'd be the youngest bank president in the country. It's a good thing, and you'd control enough money to keep you awake at night. But remember, Ben, as my dear old coloured mammy used to say to me, 'to hatch first ain't always to crow last.'"

"Do you call it hatching or crowing to become president of the Union Bank?"

"That depends. If you're shrewd and safe, as I think you are, it may turn out to be both. It would be a good plan, though, to say to yourself every time you come up Franklin Street, 'I've toted potatoes up this hill, and not my own potatoes either.' It's good for you, sir, to remember it, damned good."

"I'm not likely to forget it – they were heavy."

"It was the best thing that ever happened to you – it was the making of you. There's nothing I know so good for a man as to be able to remember that he toted somebody else's potatoes. Now, look at that George of mine. He never toted a potato in his life – not even his own. If he had, he might have been a bank president to-day instead of the pleasant, well-dressed club-man he is, with a mustache like wax-work. I've an idea, Ben, but don't let it get any farther, that he never got over not having Sally, and that took the spirit out of him. She's well, ain't she?"

"Yes, she's very well and more beautiful than ever."

"Hasn't developed any principles yet, eh? I always thought they were in her."

"None that interfere with my comfort at any rate."

"Keep an eye on her and keep her occupied all the time. That's the way to deal with a woman who has ideas – don't leave her a blessed minute to sit down and hatch 'em out. Pet her, dress her, amuse her, and whenever she begins to talk about a principle, step out and buy her a present to take her mind off it. Anything no bigger than a thimble will turn a woman's mind in the right direction if you spring it on her like a surprise. Ah, that's the way her Aunt Matoaca ought to have been treated. Poor Miss Matoaca, she went wrong for the want of a little simple management like that. You never saw Miss Matoaca Bland when she was a girl, Ben?"

"I have heard she was beautiful."

"Beautiful ain't the word, sir! I tell you the first time I ever saw her she came to church in a white poke bonnet lined with cherry-coloured silk, and her cheeks exactly a match to her bonnet lining." He got out his big silk handkerchief, and blew his nose loudly, after which he wiped his eyes, and sat staring moodily at his foot bandaged out of all proportion to its natural size.

"Who'd have thought to look at her then," he pursued, "that she'd go cracked over this Yankee abolition idea before she died."

"Why, I thought they owned slaves up to the end, General."

"Slaves? What have slaves got to do with it? Ain't the abolitionists and the woman suffragists and the rest of those damned fire-eating Yankees all the same? What they want to do is to overturn the Constitution, and it makes no difference to 'em whether they overturn it under one name or the other. I tell you, Ben, as sure's my name's George Bolingbroke, Matoaca Bland couldn't have told me to the day of her death whether she was an abolitionist or a woman's suffragist. When a woman goes cracked like that, all she wants is to be a fire-eater, and I doubt if she ever knows what she is eating it about. Women ain't like men, my boy, there isn't an ounce of moderation to the whole sex, sir. Why, look at the way they're always getting their hearts broken or their heads cracked. They can't feel an emotion or think an idea that something inside of 'em doesn't begin to split. Now, did you ever hear of a man getting his heart broken or his brain cracked?"

The canker was still there, doing its bitter work. For forty years Miss Matoaca had had her revenge, and even in the grave her ghost would not lie quiet and let him rest. In his watery little eyes and his protruding, childish lip, I read the story of fruitless excesses and of vain retaliations.

When I reached home, I found Sally in her upstairs sitting-room with Jessy, who was trying on an elaborate ball gown of white lace. Since the two years of mourning were over, the little sister had come to stay with us, and Sally was filled with generous plans for the girl's pleasure. Jessy, herself, received it all with her reserved, indifferent manner, turning her beautiful profile upon us with an expression of saintly serenity. It amused me sometimes to wonder what was behind the brilliant red and white of her complexion – what thoughts? what desires? what impulses? She went so placidly on her way, gaining what she wanted, executing what she planned, accepting what was offered to her, that there were moments when I felt tempted to arouse her by a burst of anger – to discover if a single natural instinct survived the shining polish of her exterior. Sally had worked a miracle in her manner, her speech, her dress; and yet in all that time I had never seen the ripple of an impulse cross the exquisite vacancy of her face. Did she feel? Did she think? Did she care? I demanded. Once or twice I had spoken of President, trying to excite a look of gratitude, if not of affection; but even then no change had come in the mirror-like surface of her blue eyes. President, I was aware, had sacrificed himself to her while I was still a child, had slaved and toiled and denied himself that he might make her a lady. Yet when I asked her if she ever wrote to him, she smiled quietly and shook her head.

"Why don't you write to him, Jessy? He was always fond of you."

"He writes such dreadful letters – just like a working-man's – that I hate to get them," she answered, turning to catch the effect of her train in the long mirror.

"He is a working-man, Jessy, and so am I."

She accepted the statement without demur, as she accepted everything – neither denying nor disputing, but apparently indifferent to its truth or falseness. My eyes met Sally's in the glass, and they held me in a long, compassionate gaze.

"All men are working-men, Jessy, if they are worth anything," she said, "and any work is good work if it is well done."

"He is a miner," responded Jessy.

"If he is, it is because he prefers to do the work he knows to being idle," I answered sharply. "What you must remember is that when he had little, and I had nothing, he gave you freely all that he had."

She did not answer, and for a moment I thought I had convinced her.

"Will you write to President to-night?" I asked.

"But we are having a dinner party. How can I?"

"To-morrow, then?"

"I am going to the theatre with Mrs. Blansford. Mr. Cottrel has taken a box for her. He is one of the richest men in the West, isn't he?"

"There are a great many rich men in the West. How can it concern you?"

"Oh, it's beautiful to be rich," she returned, in the most enthusiastic phrase I had ever heard her utter; and gathering her white lace train over her arm she went into her bedroom to remove the dress.

"What is she made of, Sally?" I asked, in sheer desperation; "flesh and blood, do you think?"

"I don't know, Ben, not your flesh and blood, certainly."

"But for President – why wasn't my father hanged before he gave him such a name! – she would have remained ignorant and common with all her beauty. He almost starved himself in order to send her to a good school and give her pretty clothes."

"I know, I know, it seems terribly ungrateful – but perhaps she's excited over her first dinner."

That evening we were to give our first formal dinner, and when I came downstairs a little before eight o'clock, I found the rooms a bower of azaleas, over which the pink-shaded lamps shed a light that touched Jessy's lace gown with pale rose.

"It's like fairyland, isn't it?" she said, "and the table is so beautiful. Come and see the table."

She led me into the dining-room and we stood gazing down on the decorations, while we waited for Sally.

"Who is coming, Jessy?"

"Twelve in all. General Bolingbroke and Mr. Bolingbroke, Mrs. Fitzhugh, Governor Blenner, Miss Page," she went on reading the cards, "Mr. Mason, Miss Watson, Colonel Henry, Mrs. Preston, Mrs. Tyler – "

"That will do. I'll know them when I see them. Do you like it, Jessy?"

"Yes, I like it. Isn't my dress lovely?"

"Very, but don't get spoiled. You see Sally has had this all her life, and she isn't spoiled."

"I don't believe she could be," she responded, for her admiration for Sally was the most human thing I had ever discovered about her, "and she's so beautiful – more beautiful, I think, than Bonny Page, though of course nobody would agree with me."

"Well, she's perfect, and she always was and always will be," I returned.

"You're a great man, aren't you?" she asked suddenly, turning away from the table.

"Why, no. What in the world put that into your head?"

"Well, the General told Mr. Cottrel you were a genius, and Mr. Cottrel said you were the first genius he had ever heard of who measured six feet two in his stockings."

"Of course I'm not a genius. They were joking."

"You're rich anyway, and that's just as good."

I was about to make some sharp rejoinder, irritated by her insistence on the distinction of wealth, when the sound of Sally's step fell on my ears, and a moment later she came down the brilliantly lighted staircase, her long black lace train rippling behind her. As she moved among the lamps and azaleas, I thought I had never seen her more radiant – not even on the night of her first party when she wore the white rose in her wreath of plaits. Her hair was arranged to-night in the same simple fashion, her mouth was as vivid, her grey eyes held the same mingling of light with darkness. But there was a deeper serenity in her face, brought there by the untroubled happiness of her marriage, and her figure had grown fuller and nobler, as if it had moulded itself to the larger and finer purposes of life.

"The house is charming, Jessy is lovely, and you, Ben, are magnificent," she said, her eyebrows arching merrily as she slipped her hand in my arm. "And it's a good dinner, too," she went on; "the terrapin is perfect. I sent into the country for the game, and the man from Washington came down with the decorations and the ices. Best of all, I made the salad myself, so be sure to eat it. We'll begin to be gay now, shan't we? Are you sure we have money enough for a ball?"

"We've money enough for anything that you want, Sally."

"Then I'll spend it – but oh! Ben, promise me you won't mention stocks to-night until the women have left the table."

"I'll promise you, and keep it, too. I don't believe I ever introduced a subject in my life to any woman but you."

"I'm glad, at least, there's one subject you didn't introduce to any other."

Then the door-bell rang, and we hurried into the drawing-room in time to receive Governor Blenner and the General, who arrived together.

"I almost got a fall on your pavement, Ben," said the General, "it's beginning to sleet. You'd better have some sawdust down."

It took me a few minutes to order the sawdust, and when I returned, the other guests were already in the room, and Sally was waiting to go in to dinner on the arm of Governor Blenner, a slim, nervous-looking man, with a long iron-grey mustache. I took in Mrs. Tyler, a handsome widow, with a young face and snow-white hair, and we were no sooner seated than she began to tell me a story she had heard about me that morning.

"Carry James told me she gave her little boy a penny and asked him what he meant to do with it. 'Ath Mithter Starr to thurn it into, a quarther,' he replied."

"Oh, he thinks that easy now, but he'll find out differently some day," I returned.

She nodded brightly, with the interested, animated manner of a woman who realises that the burden of conversation lies, not on the man's shoulders, but on hers. While she ate her soup I knew that her alert mind was working over the subject which she intended to introduce with the next course. From the other end of the table Sally's eyes were raised to mine over the basket of roses and lilies. Jessy was listening to George Bolingbroke, who was telling a story about the races, while his eyes rested on Sally, with a dumb, pained look that made me suddenly feel very sorry for him. I knew that he still loved her, but until I saw that look in his eyes I had never understood what the loss of her must have meant in his life. Suppose I had lost her, and he had won, and I had sat and stared at her across her own dinner table with my secret written in my eyes for her husband to read. A fierce sense of possession swept over me, and I felt angered because his longing gaze was on her flushed cheeks and bare shoulders.

"No, no wine. I've drunk my last glass of wine unless I may hope for it in heaven," I heard the General say; "a little Scotch whiskey now and then will see me safely to my grave."

"From champagne to Scotch whiskey was a flat fall, General," observed Mrs. Tyler, my sprightly neighbour.

"It's not so flat as the fall to Lithia water, though," retorted the General.

I was about to join vacantly in the laugh, when a sound in the doorway caused me to lift my eyes from my plate, and the next instant I sat paralysed by the figure that towered there over the palms and azaleas.

"Why, Benjy boy!" cried a voice, in a tone of joyous surprise, and while every head turned instantly in the direction of the words, the candles and the roses swam in a blur of colour before my eyes. Standing on the threshold, between two flowering azaleas, with a palm branch waving above his head, was President, my brother, who was a miner. Twenty years ago I had last seen him, and though he was rougher and older and greyer now, he had the same honest blue eyes and the same kind, sheepish face. The clothes he wore were evidently those in which he dressed himself for church on Sunday, and they made him ten times more awkward, ten times more ill at ease, than he would have looked in his suit of jeans.