"As you of all people should know, Charles!"
Handy was startled to realize, from the shocked silence around the table that followed this remark, that it was he who had made it. His words had obviously been taken as a direct reference to the old affair between Dexter and Annie.
"Has anyone heard any news about Erie?" Lily asked in a high, nervous quaver.
There was an instant, relieved spatter of comment.
"Oh, don't you know, Lily? The thieves have made it up."
"They're dividing the swag."
"Did anyone hear what Fisk said? That nothing is lost but honor!"
"I'm afraid I can't laugh at that. It's simply too shocking."
After dinner, when the gentlemen had joined the ladies in the parlor following their brandies and cigars, Lily rose at once to lead her father to two armchairs in a corner. As he had sat by her at dinner, her claiming him now made it perfectly evident that she did not trust him with anyone else.
"I'm getting old and waspish," he muttered apologetically. "It's probably high time I gave up going out to dinner parties."
"Stuff and nonsense! You're still the life of the party. And it was all Charley's fault, anyway. If he hadn't been such a toper, Annie might still be with him."
"I suppose Annie's nothing but a whore now. A fashionable French whore."
"Please, Papa! Be quiet! And you're quite wrong about Annie. She goes everywhere in Paris. She is even received by the Empress."
"Is that a guarantee of respectability? What was Eugenie but a little Spanish nobody that the old goat of an Emperor had to marry because her mother was smart enough to keep him out of her bed?"
"Papa! The Empress is supposed to be a saint!"
Lily was obviously relieved when Jo crossed the room to take him home.
That night Charles Handy slept only fitfully. He dreamed that he was in the White House with the Union Defense Committee and that President Lincoln, fixing his large, reproachful eyes upon him, kept saying over and over, "What is wrong, Mr. Handy? Not a single regiment has reached the capital! Yet each time that he went to Willard's Hotel to check his sources, he was told that three New York regiments had already arrived. He would keep waking up, bathed in sweat, but when he slept again the same dream would be repeated, with the martyred President sounding each time more anguished and more impatient.
The last time he awakened, it was after dawn, and he became aware of somebody sitting by his bed. It was Jo. She looked drawn and pale.
"Are you awake, Papa?"
"I am now," he grumbled. "What do you want?"
"I'm afraid I have some very bad news. There's been a terrible wreck on the Erie. The Buffalo Express. At Port Jervis." For a moment she seemed unable to go on. "It was a bad curve. Three sleepers went off the track. Selby was in one. They think he must have been killed instantly."
He stared at her stupidly. "Selby?"
"Selby Fairchild. Rosalie's boy." She paused again, and he could see now that she was weeping. "Your grandson, Papa."
"Do you think I'm an idiot? Do you think I don't know my own grandsons?"
"Of course you do, Papa. I'm sorry."
"It's a perfect scandal the way these railroads are run! I've said so again and again. It's murder, that's what it is. Men like Gould and Fisk should be strung up in public."
"I'm sure they're bad men. But that won't bring Selby back, will it?"
"Hmm." He stared, almost in embarrassment, at her bent head and shaking shoulders. "Has Rosalie been told?"
"Oh, yes, Papa."
"Will you send word to her and Dexter that I shall stand by to help them in every way I can?"
"Of course, Papa."
"And will you remind me after breakfast to write a letter to the Tribune protesting the shocking mismanagement of our railroads?"
"I'll try to remember."
"And now perhaps you will let me have my room, so I can dress?"
"I'll send Sam in."
While he was dressing, aided by the silent Sam, Handy tried to assemble his agitated thoughts. Selby's death was like an oversized domino that would not fit in the case with the others. He recalled Selby, of course, with absolute clarity. He remembered the bright chubby face, the high, infectious laugh. And he took in perfectly the fact that this unfortunate young man was now presumably a mangled corpse. It was a bad thing. A very bad thing. Number 417 would become a house of mourning. There would be weeping and lamentation. The women would be particularly noisy. The Irish maids would be impossible. And there would be no more dinner parties that season. It was horrid of him, he supposed, to be thinking of dinner parties at such a time, but the years were precious at his age, and even the shortest period of mourning could be ill afforded.
Could he perhaps take the position that he didn't believe in mourning? That those with the deepest grief might be above the outward display? Might people not actually admire an old man who insisted on fulfilling his social obligations, even with dust and ashes in his heart? But he could not fool himself about Jo. It would certainly be difficult to induce her to accompany him on any renewed social round, and had he not reached the point where he was almost afraid to go out without her?
He had shaved and donned his underwear and shirt, and was preparing, laboriously, to step into his trousers when Sam murmured something in his ear.
"What, what? Speak up, man!"
"Your tailor is outside, sir, with your new tweed suit. Might it not be easier to try it on now before you're fully dressed?"
"A good point, boy. Show him in."
Handy was almost cheered up, a few minutes later, as he contemplated his figure in the tall mirror, resplendent in fine Scottish tweed, while the tailor busily jotted down his fitting notes. There was nothing like new clothing to clear the mind. It was fortunate that gentlemen did not, like ladies, have to adopt total black. An armband would satisfy the strictest requirements of mourning, an armband and a black knitted tie, quite becoming, really...
"Who is it? Is that you, Jo? Can't you see I'm busy? I'll be right down."
"It's me, Rosalie, Papa. May I come in?"
"Oh, my dear, of course!"
And Rosalie came in, with her quick stride, pausing briefly to take in the scene.
"Oh, but I'm interrupting!"
"Not at all, not at all." Her father coughed in embarrassment and motioned abruptly to Sam to take the tailor away. Alone with Rosalie, he was shocked by her haggard look. "I was distressed beyond expression by your tragic news. My heart goes out to you and Dexter."
"We know it does, Papa."
"I told Jo that I should write the Tribune this very morning about the scandalous mismanagement of Erie. It is part and parcel of the unprincipled times we live in. And if I may say so, my dear, I hope this tragedy may have the effect of toning down some of your own public agitations."
As he heard himself say this, his eyes were fixed directly upon Rosalie's, and he made out, with a cutting clarity, that the pity in hers was not for herself, or even for poor dead Selby. And then the scene about him seemed to fall apart. There was no tweed suit, no Empire mirror, no four-poster bed, no portrait of Lafayette, no family mementos. There was only Rosalie, brokenhearted, battered, shattered Rosalie, who had lost her darling son. And there was nothing left of Charles Handy but the desperate need to reach out, to hug, to console ... to cling to a remnant of heart.
"Oh, my girl, my poor little girl, what has happened to you? Come to me, Rosalie, poor little Rosalie."
She seemed to stagger into his outstretched arms, and they clasped each other in an embrace that lasted until Jo, wondering at the silence within, timidly opened the door.
32
IN THE FORTNIGHT following Selby's death Elmira Bristow saw Fred Fairchild only twice. Of course, she recognized that his time was necessarily taken up by his grief-stricken family, but she was also very keenly aware that this was not the real cause of his defection. Fred had been devastated by the catastrophe. He had moved out of U
nion Square to a boarding house in Rector Street, and he was spending his evenings mostly at Broadway bars. He refused to call at the Bristows', where he felt, correctly, that he would not be welcome to her parents, and he and she had had to meet, on those two occasions, in Central Park, where they had walked dismally past mounds of melting snow under a slaty sky, watching the pigeons peck for the crumbs that Fred languidly produced from his pocket.
He could really talk of nothing but his guilt. He had sent Selby to his death, he would morosely insist, as surely as if he had put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. His younger brother had been the innocent victim of his own perverse need to elevate a sordid scrap among bandits to the status of a crusade for a better America. He, Fred, was worse than a thief; he was a fool. He had no present, and he had no future. It would have been far better had he perished in the Wilderness Campaign. Selby would now be alive and proud of a dead soldier brother. Elmira must learn to forget him.
She had known that she had never understood him well; now she began to wonder if she had understood him at all. How could a man who had been a hero under hardships unimaginable to her go to pieces under difficulties so perfectly plausible? Of course it must have been horrid to feel even the smallest responsibility for a brother's death, but did it take an abnormally level head to recognize an accident? What made her, at last, after much inward fretting, decide that she must learn to tolerate her own sympathy for his self-pity, was her ultimate recognition that the intensification of her own passion for him in misfortune and despair was equally irrational.
She had had her own guilt feelings, too, about Selby. There had been a nasty little corner in her heart, a dusky spot where she had harbored something like relief at the elimination of Fred's brother from her scene. He had viewed her too clearly. He had comprehended too thoroughly that she was not the demure, conventional society virgin that his brother supposed—and that his brother wanted. Not that she was troubled about deceiving Fred or in the least concerned with the disillusionment that would inevitably follow their union. That, she was sure, would be a minor matter; Fred would be essentially content with his bargain— after he had made it. But it would not have been politic to thrust in so squeamish a bachelor's face such prickly facts as that she despised her father and thought Fred a fool for ever believing in him, or that she valued in Fred's family background all the things that he himself found most trivial. Selby might never have given her away—but now he surely couldn't.
This sense of guilt, however, had been considerably lightened by her disgust at the attitude that her own father had taken as soon as he had heard of the accident. For he had simply uttered a solemn prayer that he should not be held liable to the Fairchilds for having dispatched Selby on his fatal trip! With a parent like that, could she blame herself too much for a minor meanness?
On their second walk in the park Ellie had tried to induce Fred to take a more sanguine view of his future.
"What can I do?" he asked gloomily. "I have no job, no money, no prospects. I refuse to go back to brokerage, and I'm trained for nothing else. Except killing. I might reenlist and go west to shoot Indians. That's about all I'm good for."
"Why not law? Your father would adore to have you in his firm."
"I'd have to go back to school. I've no money for that, Ellie!"
"He'd be only too happy to pay."
"But I wouldn't take it from him! How can I ask him to invest anything more in a son who has nothing to show for the last three years but an empty pocket and a murdered brother?"
Ellie resolved to take no note of his dramatics. "You wouldn't have to go to school. You could read law in his office."
"I'd still be his dependent!"
She turned to face him down. "Can't you stop thinking of yourself for a minute? Can't you think of me once?"
He seized her by the shoulders, gripping them until he hurt her. "My dear girl, I am thinking of you! Don't you know that? I want you to be free. Free of me. My God, I'm nothing but a millstone around your neck!"
She reached up to place her hands on his gripping ones. "Then I think millstones must be all the fashion this season."
But he only glared at her as if he was actually angry at such insistence. Then, abruptly, he released her. "No, no, it's not fair to you," he muttered, turning away with what was almost a sob. "Let me take you home. I'm not fit for this. I'm not fit for anything!"
Ellie decided that under the circumstances she could do nothing but acquiesce. She went home and spent two hours alone in her bedroom, thinking hard. That evening, at dinner with her parents, she coolly made her first move in the hazardous campaign that she had just devised.
"I saw Fred Fairchild today."
"You know your father and I don't approve of that young man. Don't you think it would be kinder to him not to see him? He's completely ruined his business prospects."
"Not his prospects with me, anyway, Ma. I shall continue to see Fred whenever I choose. But that is not the topic I wanted to bring up. I wanted to tell you something else, namely that..."
"Highty-tighty, Miss!" her father interrupted. "Aren't you taking a rather grand tone to those who pay for every morsel you put in your mouth? Not to speak of every stitch you put on your back?"
"Hadn't you better wait, Pa, until you hear what I have to say?"
"I'll thank you, young lady, to keep a civil tongue in your mouth!"
"My tongue is perfectly civil."
"Elmira!" her mother cried. "Please remember you're speaking to your father!"
"Well, would he rather hear it from me or from Uncle Corneel?"
"What are you talking about?" her father demanded, his eyes instantly narrowing.
"Simply this: that I expect you to arrange that Fred be compensated for his losses in Erie. Just as all the other Vanderbilt brokers are."
Her father snorted in astonishment. "Losses? What losses? Fairchild wasn't buying on his own account."
"Oh, but he was. He put everything he had into Erie. And he should be made whole. As the rest of you expect to be."
"After what he said to Uncle Corneel at the conference?" her father cried. "You dream, young lady. You dream! The Commodore never forgets a thing like that!"
"It should be perfectly easy for you to explain that to him. Tell him that Fred's young and idealistic. Tell him he was Fred's hero. Like General Grant. Tell him Fred couldn't bear to see him lose even one battle. And now, with Selby's death on top of it all, Uncle Corneel's bound to relent."
"Even if all that were true, why should I intercede for a man who insulted me so grossly to my face?"
"Because I intend to marry him," Ellie responded firmly. "And I see no reason that my husband should not share with the rest of the family."
Her mother at this seemed to waver. "She has a point there, Seth."
"But you are forgetting, Rosalinda, how that young man reviled me. No, I can never do it. That's final!"
Ellie regarded him coldly. "What do you suppose he'd have said if he'd known you were selling Erie while he was buying? Wouldn't he have really reviled you then?"
Her father's gaping face seemed to shrink and show more lines. It reminded her of an onion. "Whatever gave you such an idea?" he asked, almost in a whisper.
"Ma told me."
"Seth! I never did!"
"You're always shooting your big mouth off, Rosalinda!"
As Ellie took in the rasping hate in her father's tone, she realized with a shock what she had done. She had pulled up a floorboard in the creaking edifice of their family life and revealed the grubby little things that they had all known were underneath but which they had tacitly agreed to keep out of sight. In the shock of their sudden exposure to the light the creatures lay helplessly on their backs, their white shiny bellies exposed, their multitudinous legs waving. Glancing from her father to her mother, she read in the sudden pallor of each the effect of a similar recognition. And then a common impulse induced the three of them to shove that board back and st
amp it down.
"I was only trying to hedge a bit for the financial security of my loved ones," Seth Bristow explained, almost with a whine. "One can't expect women to understand such things. But if you're so set on this young man, Elmira, I guess I'll have to see what can be done. I'll be calling on Uncle Corneel tomorrow. Maybe he'll view the matter as you say."
"Thank you, Papa," Ellie responded warmly. "Thank you very much indeed. I shall never forget that you did this for me. If Uncle Corneel gives you any trouble, tell him that Ma and I went after you like two furies. He'll understand. He has enough daughters of his own!"
She could not quite make out what her father mumbled into his soup, but it seemed to be something about the Commodore at least knowing how to keep his "women folk" in line. Her mother now turned to her with the eye of the hostess who can never admit to an unpleasantness.
"We must ask Fred for dinner. Do you think his parents would come?"
"Hardly. They're in the deepest mourning."
"Oh, I mean just for a family evening."
Ellie did not bother to answer. She was wondering already how she would ever be able to persuade Fred to accept the reparation if offered. It seemed to her that the best plan would be to take him with her to call on her great-uncle on the excuse that the Commodore wanted to offer him personally his condolences on the death of Selby, a "casualty in the Erie war." This might be going a bit far, but in Fred's present despondency almost anything might work—or fail.
Fortunately, when she broached the matter to him the following afternoon, after her father had reported favorably of his visit to Uncle Corneel, Fred offered little resistance. Sitting in the dingy parlor of his boarding house, where she had boldly called upon him, he had simply stared at her apathetically and finally nodded.
"Well, if the old man has the decency to be sorry about it, I guess the least I can do is call upon him."
They walked to Washington Place where the Commodore lived in a plain square red brick house with a white Greek portal. It was handsome enough as New York residences went, but it was modest indeed compared to what the more newly rich were building farther uptown, and certainly modest compared to the Bristows' mansion in Madison Square. Ellie could only admire the self-assurance with which he so understated his wealth. But what might have been self-restraint without became something more like indifference within, where the whitewashed chambers were sparsely and inconsequentially furnished. They reminded Ellie of rooms in a doll's house; the pieces did not match, in size or in period. A vast Hudson River landscape might find itself hung over a miniature; a Hiram Powers caveman might be balanced by a frog.
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