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he would miss his guess. To keep on living on the top floor of the
same house, day after day, and that girl two flights below, and not be
able to do more than wish her “good morning” when he met her on
the stairs—perhaps not even that—was, to a man of his parts,
unthinkable. Yes, the party was the thing, and it would be a stag.
And he would send for the fellows the very next day, which was done
as soon as he reached his office, both by note and messenger. “Just
to whoop things up in the new quarters,” ran the notes, and, “Well,
then, all right, we’ll expect you around nine,” rounded up the verbal
invitations. Lambing was to arrive early so that he and Sam could
arrange one of their latest duets, Atwater to rattle the keys, and
Lambing to scrape the catgut. Talcott, the portrait-painter, was also
to come. Babson, a brother architect, who had won the gold medal at
the League, Sampson, Billings, and a lot more. For refreshments
there would be a chafing-dish and unlimited beer in bottles, which
Moses was to serve, and a bowl of tobacco, not to mention a varied
assortment of pipes, some of clay, with a sprinkling of corn-cobs, the
whole to be gladdened by such sandwiches as Matilda could
improvise from sundry loaves of baker’s bread and boiled ham.
These last Joe attended to himself; the musical and literary features
of the evening being left in the hands of his partner. In this was
included the standing on his head the principal guest of the evening,
provided that worthy gentleman was incapable of furnishing any
other form of diversion.
CHAPTER IV
The stranger in passing Enoch Crane on the street would have been
likely to have turned and said: “There goes a crusty old
gentleman”—he would not have omitted the word “gentleman,” for
that he looked and was.
Fifty years had moulded his appearance to a nicety in accordance
with his mode of life, which was, for the most part (when he was not
up-town at his club, or down-town at his office) passed in solitary
confinement in the top-floor suite.
He was a man of medium height, who carried his stubborn head low
bent from his shoulders, like most thinkers, though the rapid upward
glance out of his keen brown eyes was quick and piercing—even
commanding at times.
What remained of his gray hairs were neatly parted on the side and
as carefully smoothed over a cranium surmounting a broad,
intelligent forehead, the bushy eyebrows denoting a man of shrewd
perception, shadowing a grave face framed in a pair of cropped side-
whiskers. These met with a mustache nearly white, and as stiff as a
tooth-brush, that bristled over a mouth whose corners curved
downward in repose; when he opened his lips, they revealed his
even lower teeth, giving him the tenacious expression of a bulldog.
When he smiled, which was rarely, two seams bordering the chop
side-whiskers deepened in the effort. When he laughed, there
radiated upon these still rarer occasions, tinier wrinkles from the
corners of his eyes. Sham and affectation he despised. Noise made
him grit his teeth, and any undue outburst of geniality he regarded in
the light of a personal insult. No one would have dared slap Enoch
Crane on the back.
Years ago he had looked in the glass, decided he was ugly and, with
the wisdom of a philosopher, thought no more about it. He was
punctilious, nevertheless, about his dress—his favorite trousers
being of white-and-black check shepherd’s plaid, and his coat and
waistcoat of dark-gray homespun. On special occasions these were
replaced by decent black broadcloth, which, like the rest of his
clothes, were kept conscientiously brushed by Moses and hung in
the big closet off his bedroom—the one next to a small wash-closet,
provided with a cracked basin, and two worn, nickeled faucets, out of
which the water dribbled, droned, and grumbled, as if angry at being
summoned as far up as the top floor.
As for the generous square living-room itself adjoining, its four
windows commanding a view of both the back yard and Waverly
Place, there remained barely an inch of wall space from floor to
ceiling that did not hold a memory; old prints and older pictures in the
tarnished gilt frames he had picked them up in, all these hung over
three packed shelves of books. There was, too, a blackened
fireplace, a mahogany desk, its cubby-holes choked with papers and
old pipes, and opposite, a high cabinet of rosewood, its glass doors
curtained in faded green silk, screening some excellent port, and the
sermons of Spurgeon, two volumes of which lay among the heap of
papers piled on the round centre-table directly back of Enoch’s
favorite armchair.
Though the evening was mild, it did not prevent Enoch from having a
cheery fire in his grate, or from settling himself before it, sunk in the
generous leather arms of his favorite chair. He had, too, for company
a short-stemmed, brier pipe purring contentedly between his teeth,
and an early edition of “Vanity Fair” open upon his knees.
Mr. Enoch Crane’s door was closed as tight as his lips when the
agent of The United Family Laundry Association rapped. Ebner
Ford’s rap indicated that he was used to knocking at doors where he
was not needed. His career as an agent had made him past master
in intrusion and provided him with a gift of speech, both the result of
long experience.
At Ford’s summons, Enoch started irritably, laid his pipe beside Mr.
Thackeray’s masterpiece, rose with a scowl, shot an annoyed glance
at his door, and striding over to it with a grunt, flung it open wide to
the intruder with a curt nod of recognition.
“Couldn’t help paying my respects,” grinned Ford; “must be
neighborly, you know,” and with that he advanced with a smile of
assurance across the threshold.
Enoch had not opened his lips.
“Neighborly,” shouted Ford, fearing he was deaf.
“Yes,” said Enoch. “I recognize you perfectly—Mr.—Mr.—er——”
“Ford,” returned the other, the grin broadening, his outstretched hand
seeking Enoch’s, the other fumbling in the pocket of his waistcoat for
his business card. Both the card and the hand Enoch accepted in
silence.
“Looks comfy and homelike enough here,” blurted out Ford, glancing
around him. “I tell my wife, there’s nothin’ like——”
“Be seated,” intervened Enoch, waving his visitor to the armchair.
“Well, Mr.—er—Ford, what can I do for you?” He snapped out an old
gold watch attached to a chain of braided human hair, and stood
regarding his visitor with an expression of haste and annoyance.
“Forgive me if I am brief,” he added briskly, as Ford flung himself into
the proffered chair, “but I was about to go out when you knocked—a
club meeting which I must attend—an important meeting, sir.”
“Well, now, that’s too bad. Must go, eh? Thinks I, as I told my wife,
you’d be in to-night, and we could have a good old talk together—
seeing we was neighbors. Got to go, have you?” and Ford sank
deeper into the armchair, stretching out his long legs before the fire.
“Well, that’s right, never pays to be late—reminds me of that story
about the feller who was runnin’ to catch the train for Chicago and
met a red-headed girl and a white horse on the way—old man
Degraw used to tell this up in Syracuse—I can hear him now.” Here
he emitted a thin, reminiscent laugh—cut short by Enoch.
“You do not seem to comprehend, sir, that I am pressed for time,”
interrupted Enoch testily, again snapping out his watch. This time he
held its dial out for Ebner Ford’s inspection. “Eighteen minutes of
nine now, Mr. Ford—our meeting is at nine.”
“Ain’t you a little fast?” remarked the latter, pulling out his own.
“Funny how I got that watch,” Ford rattled on with an insistence that
keyed Enoch’s nerves to the quick.
Enoch had been bothered with many of the inmates in his time, but
Ford’s effrontery was new to him. The very ease with which he had
settled himself in the proffered chair set the muscles of the bulldog
jaw twitching. Forced as he had been to open his door to him,
nothing but his innate sense of breeding had, he felt, allowed the
man to cross his threshold. What he regretted most now was that he
had asked him to be seated. Ford’s hail-fellow-well-met manner sent
the hot blood in him tingling. Twice during the account of the
remarkable history of the watch Enoch had tried to check him and
failed; he might as well have tried to halt the street vender of a
patent medicine, selling with both hands to a gullible crowd. Only
when his visitor had changed the subject to a rapid-fire eulogy over
the hospitality of the young men on the floor beneath, touching at
length upon the party of the night before—the wisdom of Mrs. Ford—
the price of rent in other towns—and the care he had always
observed in giving his daughter the best education money could buy,
including French and piano lessons, did Enoch manage to dam the
torrent of his volubility with:
“Mr. Ford, you must consider our interview at an end, sir—I am late
and must be going,” and with that he strode over to the bedroom
closet for his coat and hat.
Ebner Ford slowly rose to his feet.
“Want any help?” he ventured as he watched Enoch dig a closed fist
into the sleeve of his night-coat.
“Thank you,” said Enoch curtly, wrenching himself into the rest of the
ulster, “I’m not so old but that I can dress myself.”
“What I’d like to say,” continued Ford, as Enoch searched the
corners of the closet for his night-stick, found it, and started to turn
down the Argand burner on the centre-table, “is—that it makes an
almighty big difference what kind of a house you’re in—don’t it?—as
I told Mrs. Ford, we couldn’t have struck a better place—folks in it
make a difference, too. Don’t know when I’ve enjoyed myself more’n
I did last night. Quite a party, Mr. Crane—you missed it. Big-hearted
fellers, both of ’em. We certainly had a royal time. Sorry you couldn’t
make it, friend—you were invited, of course——”
In reply, the Argand burner sank to a dull blue flame. Enoch led the
way in the semidarkness to his door.
“Some day when you’ve got more time,” continued Ford, “I’d like to
show you just about the slickest laundry plant this side of Broadway.
What we done was to get the best machinery money can buy, and
we’re not sorry. Take our flat work alone. Fourteen steam-mangles,
and seven wringers—figure that out and you’ll see how much
business we do a month. Stocks above par, Mr. Crane; no man could
ask a better investment for his money. Now, there’s a hundred
shares preferred that——”
“After you, sir,” said Enoch, as he slammed his door shut, turned the
key in the lock, and hurried his unwelcome visitor before him down
the creaky, carpeted stairs.
“At seven per cent,” rattled on Ford over his shoulder as he
descended and halted at the Grimsby-Atwater door. “Think it over,
neighbor.”
“I bid you good night, sir,” said Enoch, quickening his pace past him.
“Damn his impertinence!” he muttered to himself as he reached the
front door, opened it, closed it with a click, and rushed for a horse-
car en route to his club.
CHAPTER V
Since the coming of the Fords the house in Waverly Place had
awakened. Sue’s presence had had its effect from cellar to roof. No
sunbeam that ever smiled into a dungeon could have been more
welcome. The gloomy old stairs zigzagging up to the top floor
seemed more cheerful, and the narrow hallways it led to less dingy.
Even Aunt Matilda’s cat—a scared and fat-headed old mouser who
had refused half through January to leave its warm refuge under her
stove in the basement—could now be seen nibbling and cleaning her
paws as far up as the top carpeted step on Enoch’s floor.
There radiates from the personality of a pure young girl like Sue
something strangely akin to sunshine, something indefinable,
luminous, and warm, which no one yet has been quite able to
describe—any more than one can define “charm”—that which
touches the heart, neither can we place our finger upon that thin,
wavering border line between friendship and love—a pressure of the
hand, a glance of the eyes, a smile, a sudden gaze of sympathy and
understanding, and we stumble headlong across the frontier into the
land of adoration. To fall in love! What nonsense! We rise, with love
tingling through our veins—pounding at our temples, its precious
treasure our own, safe forever, we believe, in our beating hearts.
Ah! yes indeed, it has ever been so, and it always will be. Why is it
that Cupid, the god of love, has always been depicted as a frail little
cherub, when the truth is he is a giant, dominating, relentless, strong
as death—who swings the whole world at his beck and call. How
much misery, doubt, and happiness he has conceived and fashioned
to suit him since the world began (bless his little heart!) it is quite
impossible to compute. Eve and Adam are unfortunately dead, or we
should have it at first-hand from both of them.
Sue was not only beautiful—she was fresh, and young, and cheery,
with a frank gleam in her clear blue eyes, a complexion like a rose,
the sheen of gold in her fair hair—a lithe grace to her slim, active
body—pearly teeth, and a kind word for every one who deserved it.
No wonder that Joe Grimsby impulsively lost his head and his heart
to Sue at first sight of her. More than a week had elapsed, and
although he had had from that young lady little more encouragement
than his buoyant imagination supplied, he was far from disheartened.
What really had occurred, was that he had met his ideal face to face
on the stairs the day after the party, and she had thanked him for
inviting her, rather coldly, Joe thought. Indeed it had been quite a
formal little meeting after all. He had expressed his sorrow at her not
being able to come, and she had expressed hers—quite as formally
as a strange girl at a tea might, and he being too innately well-bred a
gentleman to force matters, had accepted her proffered little hand
with more added regrets, and shaken it as punctiliously as he was
wont to do the hands of his various hostesses in bidding them good
night. And so she went up-stairs and he went down, not, however,
without a beating heart over the interview, brief and unsatisfactory as
it had been, and a firm resolution to call on her mother—which he did
the very next day, and received word from the Irish maid of all work
who opened the door, that “Mrs. Ford begged to be excused.” The
truth was that this Southern lady did not care to know the young men
in the house, and as for Sue, the oversudden invitation to meet the
young architects of the third floor had left more of an impression of
distrust than desire.
As for Joe, Sam Atwater’s better sense and advice had only the
effect it usually does in such painful cases, of fanning into a blaze
Joe’s infatuation and spiriting on his stubborn determination to
convince Sue Preston of its sincerity. Alas! Joe had reached that
stage among young architects in love, of covering half the margins of
his quarter-scale drawings with pictorial memories of Sue—sketching
with his HB lead pencil her clean-cut, refined profile, detailing with
infinite pains the exact curve of her lovely mouth, expressing as best
he could the tenderness in her eyes, and the precise way in which
she wore her hair, half hiding her small, pink ears—in fact, he got to
dreaming hopelessly over her as he drew, and forgot in the second
draft of the Long Island woman’s cottage important members of
cornices, windows, and doors, laying in cross-sections and
elevations in a scandalous, sloppy way, until Atwater finally had to
call a halt over his shoulder with: “For Heaven’s sake, old man, cut it
out,” at which Joe grinned, and with good-natured embarrassment
promised to really get down to work.
He had declared to Sam Atwater in his outburst of enthusiasm at the
office that Sue could not sing. He was positive of this—“She did not
look like a girl who could sing”—whereas if Sue possessed one great
gift, it was her splendid soprano voice. Her voice was her very life,
her whole ambition, a possession far more valuable than the whole
worthless lot of Ebner Ford’s business ventures combined, and
wisely enough Sue realized that, whatever might happen to the
always uncertain budget of the Ford family, at least with her concert
work and her teaching, she could make her own living. When her
stepfather’s six-house venture had failed, it was Sue who came to
the rescue—with what she had earned during the two years
previous, singing in the smaller towns of Connecticut, giving lessons
wherever she could, mostly in Ebner Ford’s home town of Clapham,
the very town in which her mother had married him ten years before
to escape from impending poverty.
It may be seen, therefore, that the hard struggle the stepdaughter
had gone through had left her with a far more serious knowledge and
view of life than either Joe or the rest of the inmates of No. 99
Waverly Place were in the least conscious of.
Sue thoroughly understood her stepfather; briefly, she regretted his
methods, and still wondered how her mother could have ever
married him, poor as they were. Inwardly, too, she trembled over his
wildcat schemes, none too overscrupulous at best, while his hail-
fellow-well-met manner, which he assumed upon any occasion when
he saw a commission for himself hanging loose about the stranger,
grated upon her. Indeed she knew him thoroughly, just as he was,
bombastic varnish, vagaries, common self-assurance, and all.
Behind closed doors in the intimacy of his home, before her mother
and herself, Ebner Ford was a different man. His respect for his
stepdaughter’s wishes and better judgment was often one of ill-
tempered resignation.
He dared not disagree with his wife—a short, thick-set little woman,
several years his senior, addicted to side-combs, opinions of her
own, and an extravagant way of boasting to others of her South
Carolinian ancestry, and carefully avoiding any mention of her
husband’s from central Connecticut.
Now it happened that that dear little old spinster, Miss Ann Moulton,
who lived with her invalid sister on the second floor, was the first to
really know Sue.
These two unmarried sisters had lived together since they were girls.
They had a little property, just enough to provide for the modest
apartment they were living in, and were anywhere from fifty to sixty
years old. You could not possibly tell their exact age by looking at
them, and, of course, they would not have told you had you asked
them. They were both small, very much alike—little, gray, dried-up
women. Both very refined, very gentle in their manners, gentle of
voice, too. Miss Ann was the stronger of the two. She was the
manager. Upon her frail, little person fell all the responsibility, their
only relative being a brother who lived West, and who managed what
little property they had. She had no one else to look after her affairs,
and he was a lazy brother at that.
As for Miss Jane, the sister, she had always been an invalid. Her frail
hands were strangely transparent when held to the light, her voice
weak, her step uncertain, and her hair, like Miss Ann’s, nearly silver-
white. On the street you could hardly tell the two sisters apart. They
were so much alike, and dressed alike, which they had always done
since they were children, and yet they were not twins. There was a
difference, however; Miss Jane’s cheeks were sunken, and there
were dark circles under her patient, gray eyes. She never let any one
know she was an invalid; neither did Miss Ann mention it. It had all
happened so many years ago, but it was as clear in Jane Moulton’s
memory as if it had happened yesterday: Her gasping for breath, her
failing strength as she fought on in the grip of an ebb-tide. His sharp
cry to her to keep her head, then his strong arm about her—
blackness—then the beach, and he whom she loved, who had given
his life for hers, lying drowned upon it.
A small daguerreotype of him hung above her bed; one taken when
he was eighteen, the year they were engaged.