It was the custom at Richard Pennington’s dinners for the men to follow the ladies at once to the library or drawing-room if they cared to, for Nellie Pennington liked smoking and made no bones about it. People who dined with her were expected to do exactly as they pleased, and this included the use of tobacco in all parts of the house. She was not running a kindergarten, she insisted, and the mothers of timorous buds were amply warned that they must look to the habits of their tender offspring. And so after the ices were served, when the women departed, some of their dinner partners followed them into the other rooms, finding more pleasure in the cigarette à deux than in the stable talk at the dismantled dining-table.
Phil Gallatin rose and followed the ladies to the door and then returned, sank into a vacant chair and began smoking, thinking deeply of the new difficulty into which Nina Jaffray had plunged him. A small group of men remained, Larry Kane, William Worthington, Ogden Spencer, and Egerton Savage, who gathered at the end of the table around their host.
“Selected your 1913 model yet, Bibby?” Pennington asked with a laugh. “What is she to be this time? Inside control, of course, maximum flexibility, minimum friction——”
“Oh, forget it, Dick,” said Worthington, sulkily.
[137]
“No offense, you know. Down on your luck? Cheer up, old chap, you’ll be in love again presently. There are as many good fish in the sea——”
“I’m not fishing,” put in Bibby with some dignity.
“By George!” whispered Larry Kane, in awed tones, “I believe he’s got it again. Oh, Bibby, when you marry, Venus will go into sackcloth and ashes!”
“So will Bibby,” said Spencer. “Marriage isn’t his line at all. You know better than that, don’t you, Bibby. No demnition bow-wows on your Venusberg—what? You’ve got the secret. Love often and you’ll love longer. Aren’t I right, Bibby?”
“Oh, let Bibby alone,” sighed Savage. “He’s got the secret. I take my hat off to him. Every year he bathes in the Fountain of Youth, and like the chap in the book—what’s his name?—gazes at his rejuvenated reflection in the limpid pool of virgin eyes. Look at him! Forty-five, if he’s a day, and looks like a stage juvenile.”
Gallatin listened to the chatter with dull ears, smiling perfunctorily, not because he enjoyed this particular kind of humor, but because he did not choose to let his silence become conspicuous. And when the sounds from a piano were heard and the men rose to join the ladies, he had made a resolve to see Jane Loring alone before the evening was gone.
In the drawing-room Betty Tremaine was playing airs from the latest Broadway musical success, which Dirwell De Lancey was singing with a throaty baritone. Jane Loring sat on a sofa next to her hostess, both of them laughing at young Perrine, who began showing the company a new version of the turkey-trot.
“Do a ‘Dance Apache,’ Freddy,” cried Nina Jaffray, springing to her feet. “You know,” and before he knew what she was about, he was seized by the arms, and while[138] Miss Tremaine caught the spirit of the thing in a gay cadence of the Boulevards, the two of them flew like mad things around the room, to the imminent hazard of furniture and its occupants. There was something barbaric in their wild rush as they whirled apart and came together again and the dance ended only when Freddy Perrine catapulted into a corner, breathless and exhausted. Miss Jaffray remained upright, her slender breast heaving, her eyes dark with excitement, glancing from one to another with the bold challenge of a Bacchante fresh from the groves of Naxos. There was uproarious applause and a demand for repetition, but as no one volunteered to take the place of the exhausted Perrine, the music ceased and Miss Jaffray, after rearranging her disordered hair, threw herself into a vacant chair.
“You’re wonderful, Nina!” said Nellie Pennington, languidly, “but how can you do it? It’s more like wrestling than dancing?”
“I like wrestling,” said Miss Jaffray, unperturbedly.
Auction tables were formed in the library and the company divided itself into parties of three or four, each with its own interests. Gallatin soon learned that it might prove difficult to carry his resolution into effect, for Miss Loring was the center of a group which seemed to defy disruption, and Coleman Van Duyn immediately pre-empted the nearest chair, from which nothing less than dynamite would have availed to dislodge him. Gallatin had heard that Van Duyn had been with the Lorings in Canada, and had wondered vaguely whether this fact could have anything to do with that gentleman’s sudden change of manner toward himself. The two men had gone to the same school, and the same university; and while they had never been by temper or inclination in the slightest degree suited to each other, circumstances threw[139] them often together and as fellow club-mates they had owed and paid each other a tolerable civility. But this winter Van Duyn’s nods had been stiff and his manner taciturn. Personally, Phil Gallatin did not care whether Coleman Van Duyn was civil or not, and only thought of the matter in its possible reference to Jane Loring. Gallatin leaned over the back of the sofa in conversation with Nellie Pennington, listening with one ear to Coley’s rather heavy attempts at amiability.
After a while his hostess moved to a couch in the corner and motioned for him to take the place beside her.
“You know, Phil,” she began, reproving him in her softest tones, “I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately. Aren’t you flattered? You ought to be. I’ve made up my mind to speak to you with all the seriousness of my advanced years.”
“Yes, Mother, dear,” laughed Phil. “What is it now? Have I been breaking window-panes or pulling the cat’s tail?”
“Neither—and both,” she returned calmly. “But it’s your sins of omission that bother me most. You’re incorrigibly lazy!”
“Thanks,” he said, settling himself comfortably. “I know it.”
“And aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
“Awfully.”
“I’m told that you’re never in your office, that you’ve let your practice go to smash, that your partners are on the point of casting you into the outer darkness.”
“Oh, that’s true,” he said wearily. “I’ve practically withdrawn from the firm, Nellie. I didn’t bring any business in. It’s even possible that I kept some of it out. I’m a moral and physical incubus. In fact, John Kenyon has almost told me so.”
[140]
“Well, what are you going to do about it?”
“Do?
A Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and thou.
If you’ll come with me, Nellie.”
There was no response of humor in Nellie Pennington’s expression.
“No,” she said quietly. “Not I. I want you to be serious, Phil.” She paused a moment, looking down, and when her eyes sought his again he saw in them the spark of a very genuine interest. “I don’t know whether you know it or not, Phil, but I’m really very fond of you. And if I didn’t understand you as well as I do, of course, I wouldn’t dare to be so frank.”
Philip Gallatin inclined his head slightly.
“Go on, please,” he said.
She hesitated a moment and then clutched his arm with her strong fingers.
“I want you to wake up, Phil,” she said with sudden insistence. “I want you to wake up, to open your eyes wide—wide, do you hear, to stretch your intellectual fibers and learn something of your own strength. You’re asleep, Boy! You’ve been asleep for years! I want you to wake up—and prove the stuff that’s in you. You’re the last of your line, Phil, the very last; but whatever the faults your fathers left you, you’ve got their genius, too.”
Gallatin was slowly shaking his head.
“Not that—only——”
“I know it,” she said proudly. “You can’t hide from everybody, Phil. I still remember those cases you won when you were just out of law-school—that political one[141] and the other of the drunkard indicted on circumstantial evidence——”
“I was interested in that,” he muttered.
“You’ll be interested again. You must be. Do you hear? You’ve come to the parting of the ways, Phil, and you’ve got to make a choice. You’re drifting with the tide, and I don’t like it, waiting for Time to provide your Destiny when you’ve got the making of it in your own hands. You’ve got to put to sea, hoist what sail you’ve got and brave the elements.”
“I’m a derelict, Nellie,” he said painfully.
“Shame! Phil,” she whispered. “A derelict is a ship without a soul. You a derelict! Then society is made up of derelicts, discards from the game of opportunity. Some of us are rich. We think we can afford to be idle. Ambition doesn’t matter to such men as Dick, or Larry Kane, or Egerton Savage. Their lines were drawn in easy places, their lives were ready-made from the hour that they were born. But you! There’s no excuse for you. You are not rich. As the world considers such things, you’re poor and so you’re born for better things! You’ve got the Gallatin intellect, the Gallatin solidity, the Gallatin cleverness——”
“And the Gallatin insufficiency,” he finished for her.
“A fig for your vices,” she said contemptuously. “It’s the little men of this world that never have any vices. No big man ever was without them. Whatever dims the luster of the spirit, the white fire of intellect burns steadily on, unless—” she paused and glanced at him, quickly, lowering her voice—“unless the luster of the spirit is dimmed too long, Phil.”
He clasped his long fingers around one of his knees and looked thoughtfully at the rug.
“I understand,” he said quietly.
[142]
“You don’t mind my speaking to you so, do you, Phil, dear?”
He closed his eyes, and then opening them as though with an effort, looked at her squarely.
“No, Nellie.”
Her firm hand pressed his strongly. “Let me help you, Phil. There are not many fellows I’d go out of my way for, not many of them are worth it. Phil, you’ve got to take hold at once—right away. Make a fresh start.”
“I did take hold for—for a good while and then—and then I slipped a cog——”
“Why? You mean it was too hard for you?”
“No, not at all. It had got so that I wasn’t bothered—not much—that is—I let go purposely.” He stopped suddenly. “I can’t tell you why. I guess I’m a fool—that’s all.”
She examined his face with a new interest. There was something here she could not understand. She had known Phil Gallatin since his boyhood and had always believed in him. She had watched his development with the eyes of an elder sister, and had never given up the hope that he might carry on the traditions of his blood in all things save the one to be dreaded. She had never talked with him before. Indeed, she would not have done so to-night had it not been that a strong friendly impulse had urged her. She made it a practice never to interfere in the lives of others, if interference meant the cost of needless pain; but as she had said to him, Phil Gallatin was worth helping. She was thankful, too, that he had taken her advice kindly.
What was this he was saying about letting go purposely. What—but she had reached the ends of friendliness and the beginnings of curiosity.
[143]
“No, you’re not a fool, Phil. You sha’n’t call yourself names.” And then, “You say you weren’t bothered—much?”
“No. Things had got a good deal easier for me. I was beginning to feel hopeful for the future. It had cost me something, but I had got my grip. I had started in at the office again, and Kenyon had given me some important work to do. Good old Uncle John! He seemed to know that I was trying.”
He stopped a moment and then went on rapidly. “He turned me loose on a big corporation case the firm was preparing for trial. I threw myself into the thing, body and soul. I worked like a dog—night and day, and every hour that I worked my grip on myself grew stronger. I was awake then, Nellie, full of enthusiasm, my old love of my profession glowing at a white heat that absorbed and swallowed all other fires. It seemed that I found out some things the other fellows had overlooked, and a few days before the big case was to be called, Kenyon asked me if I didn’t want to take charge. I don’t believe he knew how good that made me feel. I seemed to have come into my own again. I knew I could win and I told him so. So he and Hood dropped out and turned the whole thing over to me. I had it all at my fingers’ ends. You know, I once learned a little law, Nellie, and I was figuring on a great victory.”
As Gallatin spoke, his long frame slowly straightened, his head drew well back on his shoulders and a new fire glowed in his eyes.
“It was great!” he went on. “I don’t believe any man alive ever felt more sure of himself than I did when I wound up that case and shut up my desk for the day. If I won, and win I should, it would give Kenyon, Hood and Gallatin a lot of prestige. Things looked pretty[144] bright that night. I began to see the possibilities of a career, Nellie, a real career that even a Gallatin might be proud of.”
He came to a sudden pause, his figure crumpled, and the glow in his eyes faded as though a film had fallen across them.
“And then?” asked Nellie Pennington.
“And then,” he muttered haltingly, “something happened to me—I had a—a disappointment—and things went all wrong inside of me—I didn’t care what happened. I went to the bad, Nellie, clean—clean to the bad——”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pennington softly, “I heard. That’s why I spoke to you to-night. You haven’t been——”
“No, thank God, I’m keeping straight now, but it did hurt to have done so well and then to have failed so utterly. You see the case I was speaking of—Kenyon, Hood and Gallatin had turned the whole business over to me, and I wasn’t there to plead. They couldn’t find me. There was a postponement, of course, but my opportunity had passed and it won’t come again.”
He stopped, glanced at her face and then turned away. “I don’t know why I’ve told you these things,” he finished soberly, “for sympathy is hardly the kind of thing a man in my position can stand for.”
Nellie Pennington remained silent. Her interest was deep and her wonder uncontrollable. Therefore, being a woman, she did not question. She only waited. Her woman’s eyes to-night had been wide open, and she had already made a rapid diagnosis of which her curiosity compelled a confirmation.
They were alone at their end of the room. Miss Loring and Mr. Van Duyn had gone in to the bridge tables[145] and Egerton Savage was conversing in a low tone with Betty Tremaine, whose fingers straying over the piano, were running softly through an aria from “La Bohème.”
“You know, Nellie,” he went on presently, “I’m not in the habit of talking about my own affairs, even with my friends, but I believe it’s done me a lot of good to talk to you. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?”
She nodded and then went on quickly. “The trouble with you is that you don’t talk enough about yourself, Phil. You’re a seething mass of introspection. It isn’t healthy. Friends are only conversational chopping-blocks after all. Why don’t you use them? Me—for instance. I’m safe, sane, and I confess a trifle curious.” She paused a moment, and then said keenly:
“It’s a girl, of course.”
He raised his head quickly, and then lowered it as quickly again.
“No, there isn’t any girl.”
“Oh, yes, there is. I’ve known it for quite two hours.”
“How?” he asked in alarm.
She waved her fan with a graceful gesture. “Second sight, a sixth sense, an appreciation for the fourth dimension—in short—the instinct of a woman.”
“You mean that you guessed?”
“No, that I perceived.”
“It takes a woman to perceive something which doesn’t exist,” he said easily.
She turned and examined him with level brows. “Then why did you admit it?”
“I didn’t.”
She leaned back among her pillows and laughed at him mockingly. “Oh, Phil! Must I be brutal?”
“What do you mean?”
“That the girl—is here—to-night.”
[146]
“That is not true,” he stammered. “She is not here.”
Mrs. Pennington did not spare him.
“A moment ago—you denied that there was a girl. Now you’re willing to admit that she’s only absent. Please don’t doubt the accuracy of my feminine deductions, Phil. Nothing provokes me more. You may drive me to the extreme of mentioning her name.”
Gallatin stopped fencing. It was an art he was obliged reluctantly to confess, in which he was far from a match for this tantalizing adversary. So he relapsed into silence, aware that the longer the conversation continued the more vulnerable he became.
But she reassured him in a moment.
“Oh, why won’t you trust me?” she whispered, her eyes dark with interest. “I do want to help you if you’ll let me. It was only a guess, Phil, a guess founded on the most intangible evidence, but I couldn’t help seeing (you know a heaven-born hostess is Midas-eared and Argus-eyed) what passed between you and Jane Loring.”
“Nothing that I’m aware of passed between us,” he said quietly. “She was very civil.”
“As civil as a cucumber—no more—no less. How could I know that she didn’t want to go in to dinner with you?”
“You heard?”
“Yes, from the back of my head. Besides, Phil, I’ve always told you that your eyes were too expressive.” His look of dismay was so genuine that she stopped and laid her hand along his arm. “I was watching you, Phil. That’s why I know. I shouldn’t have noticed, if I hadn’t been.”
“Yes,” he slowly admitted at last. “Miss Loring and I had met before.”
[147]
At that he stopped and would say no more. Instinct warned her that curiosity had drawn her to the verge of intrusiveness, and so she, too, remained silent while through her head a hundred thoughts were racing—benevolent, romantic, speculative, concerning these two young people whom she liked—and one of whom was unhappy. They had met before, on terms of intimacy, but where?
Intimacies worth quarreling over were scarcely to be made in the brief season during which Jane Loring had been in New York, for unlike Mr. Worthington, Phil Gallatin was no cultivator of social squabs. Obviously they had met elsewhere. Last summer? Phil Gallatin was fishing in Canada—Canada! So was Jane! Mrs. Pennington straightened and examined her companion curiously. She had heard the story of Phil Gallatin’s wood-nymph and was now thoroughly awake to the reasons for his reticence, so she sank back among her cushions, her eyes downcast, a smile wreathing her lips, the smile of the collector of objects of art and virtue who has stumbled upon a hidden rarity. It was a smile, too, of self-appreciation and approval, for her premises had been negligible and her conclusion only arrived at after a process of induction which surprised her by the completeness of its success. She was already wondering how her information could best serve her purposes as mediator when Gallatin spoke again.
“We had met before, Nellie, under unusual and—and—er—trying conditions. There was a—misunderstanding—something happened—which you need not know—a damage to—to her pride which I would give my right hand to repair.”
“Perhaps, if you could see her alone——”
“Yes, I was hoping for that—but it hardly seems possible here.”
[148]
Mrs. Pennington was leaning forward now, slightly away from him, thinking deeply, thoroughly alive to her responsibilities—her responsibilities to Jane Loring as well as to the man beside her. It was the judgment of the world that Phil was a failure—her own judgment, too, in spite of her affection for him; and yet in her breast there still lived a belief that he still had a chance for regeneration. She had seen the spark of it in his eyes, heard the echo of it in tones of his voice when he had spoken of his last failures. She hesitated long before replying, her eyes looking into space, like a seer of visions, as though she were trying to read the riddle of the future. And when she spoke it was with tones of resolution.
“I think it might be managed. Will you leave it to me?”
She gave him her hand in a warm clasp. “I believe in you, Phil, and I understand,” she finished softly.
Gallatin followed her to the door of the library, unquiet of mind and sober of demeanor. He had long known Nellie Pennington to be a wonderful woman and the tangible evidences of her cleverness still lingered as the result of his interview. There seemed to be nothing a woman of her equipment could not accomplish, nothing she could not learn if she made up her mind to it. In twenty minutes of talk she had succeeded in extracting from Gallatin, without unseemly effort, his most carefully treasured secret, and indeed he half suspected that her intuition had already supplied the missing links in the chain of gossip that was going the rounds about him. But he did not question her loyalty or her tact and, happy to trust his fortunes entirely into her hands, he approached the bridge-tables aware that the task which his hostess[149] had assumed so lightly was one that would tax her ingenuity to the utmost.
Her last whispered admonition as she left him in the hall had been “Wait, and don’t play bridge!” and so he followed her injunction implicitly, wondering how the miracle was to be accomplished. Miss Loring did not raise her head at his approach, and even when the others at the table nodded greetings she bent her head upon her cards and made her bids, carelessly oblivious of his presence.
Miss Jaffray hardly improved his situation when she flashed a mocking glance up at him and laughed. “Satyr!” she said. “I could never have believed it of you, Phil. You were such a nice little boy, too, though you would pull my pig-tail!”
“Don’t mind Nina, Phil,” said Worthington gayly. “Satyrical remarks are her long suit, especially when she’s losing.”
Nina regarded him reproachfully. “There was a time, Bibby, when you wouldn’t have spoken so unkindly of me. Is this the way you repay your debt of gratitude?”
“Gratitude!”
“Yes, I might have married you, you know.”
“Oh, Nina! I’d forgotten.”
“Think of the peril you escaped and be thankful!”
“I am,” he said devoutly.
“You ought to be.” And then to Miss Loring, “Bibby hasn’t proposed to you yet, has he, Jane,” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Jane laughing. “Have you, Mr. Worthington?”
He flushed painfully and gnawed at his small mustache. Nina had scored heavily.
[150]
“I hope he does,” Jane went on with a sense of throwing a buoy to a drowning man, “because I’m sure I’d accept him.”
Worthington smiled gratefully and adored her in fervent silence.
“Men have stopped asking me to marry them lately,” sighed Nina. “It annoys me dreadfully.” She spoke of this misfortune with the same careless tone one would use with reference to a distasteful pattern in wall-paper.
“But think of the hearts you’ve broken,” said Gallatin.
“Or of the hearts I wanted to break but couldn’t,” she replied. “Yours, for instance, Phil.”
“You couldn’t have tried very hard,” he laughed.
“I didn’t know you were a satyr then,” she said, pushing her chair back from the table. “Your rubber, I think, Bibby. I’m sure we’d better stop, Dick, or you’ll never ask me here again.”